By Yoon Ja-young
Naver, the country’s top portal, stopped providing a mobile baseball broadcasting service through the 3G network only 40 days after its launch.
It says it halted the service as it didn’t want to offer poor quality viewing, but it evidently lacked proper preparation.
Following an agreement with the Korea Baseball Organization, Naver started broadcasting games from July 6, citing growing demand among baseball fans who didn’t want to miss any games on their way home from work.
The service immediately drew fans, with as many as 20,000 users logging on to the service using their smartphones or tablets at the same time only two weeks after launching.
Naver, however, suddenly stopped providing it through the 3G network on Aug. 16. The service is now being provided only through Wi-Fi.
“There was growing consumer complaints as the streaming often stopped. We determined that we had better stop it to offer better quality service,” a representative for Naver said.
The top portal, however, can’t be free from criticism that it launched the service too hastily. At the time there was concern that the mobile broadcasting would weigh too much on a 3G network already suffering huge traffic.
When watching a baseball game of about three hours on a smartphone, it incurs 700 megabytes of data traffic. Since as many as 20,000 people were watching a game simultaneously, the burden on the network was debilitating.
Naver chose to ignore the warnings. Mobile carriers here offer streaming services through only Wi-Fi, but Naver ventured to offer streaming service through 3G. “Wi-Fi is about 10 times faster than 3G, and it naturally offers better video quality. That’s why we offer streaming services only through Wi-Fi,” said a representative of KT, the country’s second largest mobile carrier. She added that offering streaming services through 3G networks is too much to handle.
Another industry analyst said interruption is inevitable in 3G streaming as the speed isn’t competitive enough to back up the service.
Some say that theoretically Naver could have lessened the problem by securing many servers or designing routes technically more effective. Naver said they took all necessary measures.
“We’ve made all such efforts, but we halted the service as it didn’t go smoothly in the current situation,” the representative for Naver said. He said Naver had prepared enough before the launch, but the service wasn’t good in some parts of the network.
Some users were hit by Naver’s sudden halt of the service as they had switched to an unlimited data scheme from cheaper limited schemes to enjoy the baseball broadcasting service.
“We will consider resuming the service only when the network and the mobile broadcasting improve enough to satisfy users. For now, we have no comment on the issue,” the representative said.
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