AT&T to throttle your video quality in the name of 'data saving'

This was announced 72 hours after Trump was elected... a president who vocally opposes net neutrality.

http://about.att.com/story/att_introduces_stream_saver.html

Note that this is categorically worse than the T-Mobile deal. Unlike T-Mobile Binge On, this throttled data still counts against your data quota. Users get nothing in exchange. It's forcing a quality limit setting (one that most mobile video apps already provide) and making it difficult to disable.

I'm curious to know how they are planning on doing this from a technical standpoint. I can understand them throttling video streaming for their own services (such as the U-Verse app), but to do it for other services? I also can't imagine that the processing power required to do this on-the-fly is trivial.

After reading a little more, it looks like they're capping any video streams they can detect on their network at 1.5Mbps, and not attempting to re-encode anything.

They'll probably copy how T-Mobile does it.

One of the downsides to our new net-neutrality laws is that AT&T can't charge users less money for a downgraded 480P video stream.