Context

The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and India’s public service broadcaster Prasar Bharati are exploring the feasibility of a technology that allows broadcasting video and other forms of multimedia content directly to mobile phones, without needing an active internet connection.

About

Direct-to-Mobile (D2M) broadcasting:

• The technology is based on the convergence of broadband and broadcast, using which mobile phones can receive terrestrial digital TV.
• It would be similar to how people listen to FM radio on their phones, where a receiver within the phone can tap into radio frequencies.
• Using D2M, multimedia content can also be beamed to phones directly.
  

Possible benefits:

• It can possibly be used to directly broadcast content related to citizen-centric information.
• It can be further used to counter fake news, issue emergency alerts and offer assistance in disaster management.
• It can be used to broadcast live news, sports etc. on mobile phones.
• The content should stream without any buffering whatsoever while not consuming any internet data.

Impact:

• For consumers:
• A technology like this would mean that they would be able to access multimedia content from Video on Demand (VoD) or Over The Top (OTT) content platforms without having to exhaust their mobile data and at a nominal rate.
• The technology will also allow people from rural areas, with limited or no internet access, to watch video content.
• For businesses:
• It can enable telecom service providers to offload video traffic from their mobile network onto the broadcast network.
• It will help them to decongest valuable mobile spectrum.
• This will also improve usage of mobile spectrum and free up bandwidth which will help reduce call drops, increase data speeds