How can T-Mobile afford to offer its Binge On streaming video service at no extra cost to its Simple Choice customers who pay for more than 3GB of LTE data a month?

Won’t it be crummy video? Won’t it cause congestion on T-Mobile’s networks and lead to frustrations for customers?

T-Mobile officials offered a few technical details after Tuesday’s announcement to shed light on how it will make video streaming from 24 content providers possible starting Sunday.

What about the quality?

T-Mobile called its streaming service “optimized,” although some analysts have preferred to call it “compressed” video that delivers 480p quality to smartphones and tablets. That’s far lower resolution than the widely available HD 1080p quality. Some analysts referred to T-Mobile’s proprietary technology as a form of “adaptive bitrate optimization coding technology.” This is software that can automatically adapt the amount of data sent to appear on a smartphone from larger devices.

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