Other members of the consortium are Ericsson, Facebook, the GSA (Global mobile Suppliers Association), the GSMA, Indycar, Intel, KPN, Qualcomm and Verizon.

The LTE Broadcast User Group was announced at the Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona. The group will act as a forum for the exchange of experiences and best practices on the establishment and operation of LTE Broadcast services.

The intention is to “promote the use of LTE Broadcast more widely in the industry and to catalyse the development of an ecosystem around the service.” A statement announcing the formation of the group said mobile video traffic is growing rapidly and is expected to make up 55% of all mobile data traffic by 2020.

“LTE Broadcast is attracting significant and growing industry traction as a method for making the best use of existing network resources and available spectrum to introduce new video services and reduce the strain on the network.” Dan Warren, senior director of technology, GSMA, said:

“The principal objective of the User Group is to share the best practices that will spur industry growth and widespread adoption as we enter a new era of personalised media content.

“Users want anytime, anywhere, any device access to their media and entertainment. LTE Broadcast is a key technology to enable delivery of content in an optimal way. It can relieve some of the heavy traffic burden that operators would otherwise have to support.

Mobile operators and service and content providers can benefit from new revenue opportunities, service differentiation and more efficient distribution of popular media content sought by multiple subscribers. A large number of trials and field deployments worldwide have already proven the viability of the technology and demonstrated new use cases and business models.”

Alan Hadden, VP of research, GSA, said “The combination of expanding global LTE coverage, assisted by deployments in lower bands including falling terminal costs and LTE Broadcast technology will extend education, health and other public service programs to billions of citizens, for which GSA encourages device ecosystems to be developed.”

The first meeting of the group featured a presentation by Facebook of their perspectives and use case of LTE Broadcast to deliver app updates to reach billions of users worldwide.