Opinion: Can T-Mobile make video streamers bend to its will?

My post Thursday about T-Mobile’s “Binge On” offering drew some pointed feedback from readers worried about the long-term implications of a mobile carrier favoring some streaming services over others.

To recap, T-Mobile announced this week that it would let users stream video from about two dozen online services, including Netflix, Hulu, Major League Baseball and Sling TV, without data charges. It’s the video version of the unlimited music streaming feature it launched last year.

This raises net neutrality questions because some online services are being treated better by an Internet service provider (T-Mobile) than others. But in Thursday’s post, I argued that it wasn’t a net neutrality problem because, among other factors, any streaming service that met T-Mobile’s technical standard could participate in Binge On for free.

But that was cold comfort to the Twitterverse. Here’s a couple of tweets by a New Hampshire techie that hone in on a key issue raised by critics of the post:

Technically, anything an ISP does to manage its network could be seen as violating a perfectly neutral world of dumb pipes ferrying bits to and from Internet users. But the Federal Communications Commission’s rules leave room for reasonable network management, and rightly so. What T-Mobile is doing could be seen as a two-fer: It’s trying to manage its network by giving video streaming services an incentive to stream at a lower bit rate (480P, or DVD quality) while differentiating itself from other mobile phone companies.

As to Geoff Johnson’s worry about T-Mobile having too much control over content, let’s play out his nightmare scenario to its logical conclusion. Consumers are so enamored of free video streaming, they flock to T-Mobile, prompting every streaming service to “bend” to T-Mobile’s demand for 480P streams and the other mobile carriers to embrace unlimited streaming. And that’s a bad thing?

Here are a few more things to bear in mind. T-Mobile customers who would prefer to be charged for every byte of data they stream can easily switch to another carrier; the switching costs are near zero, given the carriers’ willingness to pay the early termination fees their rivals impose.

More importantly, T-Mobile has a powerful incentive to open the Binge On tent to any streamer that wants to be included. Doing so makes the service more attractive to consumers while minimizing the chance that a service will file a net neutrality complaint with the FCC.

As for the technical requirements T-Mobile sets, remember that the vast majority of video streaming to mobile devices occurs over WiFi, not cellular networks. The default setting for seemingly every iPhone and many other mobile devices is to use WiFi wherever it’s available, which is why your phone’s data traffic switches away from the cellular network the moment you walk into your apartment.

That means video streaming services will continue to have an incentive to offer high-definition video in addition to T-Mobile’s format. Or they may just ignore Binge On altogether, because the use case involved -- video on the bus or in the rare WiFi-free zone -- simply isn’t significant enough for them to bother streaming in that format. Perhaps that’s why YouTube and Facebook, the two biggest sources of video streams, haven’t decided to Binge On yet. See this post from Sandvine’s Dan Deeth for some good data on streaming sources during prime Internet hours.

Net neutrality advocates -- a group that includes me and The Times’ editorial board -- don’t want ISPs tilting the playing field for or against any content, service and app providers. Yet the best way to protect against that is to have vigorous competition among ISPs, with no hurdles placed in the path of consumers who want to switch from one ISP to another.

Those conditions exist today in wireless broadband, although they don’t on the wired side. That’s another, powerful corrective against T-Mobile using Binge On to punish some streaming services and reward others, as opposed to simply giving its customers more streaming video to differentiate itself from the other mobile carriers.

Email Jon Healey

Follow Healey’s intermittent Twitter feed: @jcahealey