T-Mobile Extends Binge On to NBC, Video From Spotify, More

A little more than two months after T-Mobile added YouTube—the granddaddy of online video—to Binge On, the carrier today broadened its video and audio streaming lineup to include more than 80 sources.

The Binge On expansion includes NBC, Univision, Noggin, Qello Concerts, and more. Music Freedom participants Google Play Music, Spotify, and Radio Disney, and Tidal will also extend their video offerings to Binge On, so you can watch music videos and such on T-Mobile without it counting against your data limits. The caveat is video quality: Binge On typically streams at DVD quality (480p).

T-Mobile has regularly expanded Binge On since it launched six months ago, and uses it as a weapon in the fierce propaganda war it wages with rival US carriers Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint. Case in point: "I hope Dumb and Dumber just keep pushing their mobile video schemes, it just gives consumers more and more reason to come to T-Mobile!" T-Mobile CEO John Legere said in a statement.

T-Mobile also included some stats in today's announcement, including that customers have streamed more than 377 million hours of video since Binge On launched. The company claims 93 percent of people it surveyed said they like the idea of having all video optimized to DVD quality so they can watch more using the same amount of high-speed data.

An independent, crowdsourced study earlier this year confirmed customers' enthusiasm for the service. Using an app installed on more than 1,000 T-Mobile phones, the study discovered that Binge On is leading T-Mobile customers to use video apps more often and longer, but only to consume the same amount of data they did before.

But critics, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, claim that Binge On is a threat to net neutrality. The EFF published a report in January that says T-Mobile throttles all HTML5 video streams to around 1.5Mbps, even when a phone is capable of downloading at higher speeds.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.