AT&T actually wants to save you data with 'Stream Saver'

AT&T wants to help save your data with Stream Saver.

AT&T will be rolling out a free data-saving feature for mobile customers in 2017. It's called Stream Saver, and it will be available to most AT&T mobile customers with a data plan, including GoPhone customers. Once activated on your AT&T account, customers will have the freedom to turn the feature on and off as needed through myAT&T account settings.

From the press release:

Stream Saver lets you watch more video on your wireless phone or tablet while using less data, by streaming most higher definition video at standard definition quality, similar to DVD (about 480p). Stream Saver helps your data go further.

That means more emailing, surfing, shopping, navigating, listening to music, and of course, more video.

But like all things, you'll want to check out the fine print. At the bottom of their release, AT&T vaguely states that Stream Saver won't necessarily work with all video, due to the way some content owners deliver their video streams. We will likely have to wait until Stream Saver rolls out to find out which services might not be included.

This seems to be AT&T's response to T-Mobile's Binge On service, which lets customers stream video from specific services such as Netflix, Hulu and HBO Go without it counting towards their monthly data cap. Binge On garnered scorn from net neutrality advocates who argue zero-rated plans give an unfair edge to the major content providers. AT&T's plan appears to avoid such controversies by treating all video streaming equally, but again we will have to wait and see which video services will and will not be be compatible with Stream Saver.