What Is Layer3 TV and How Does It Work
69What Is Layer3 TV and How Does It Work.
Layer3 TV — a cable TV company that T-Mobile is looking to acquire and use as a foundation for a new streaming service — has launched with lofty ambitions, and some of the same technology that Apple added to its lineup this year.
While most cable companies require their own wires to send hundreds of channels to your home, Layer3 TV claims its encoding technology can send them using your existing Internet subscription. And it's slinging a list of up to 275 channels — which is pretty competitive with what you get from traditional cable.
T-Mobile may be acquiring Layer3 TV because it's able to act like a cable company without those pesky cables. It manages to pull this off by using the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) technology to reduce its streaming bandwidth requirement from 10 MBps down to 4 Mbps. Furthermore, it still manages to stream 4K content at that rate.