T-Mobile recently tweaked it’s T-Mobile One Plan in response to Verizon bringing back unlimited data, and have now announced that they will soon do away with the HD Day Pass option that it was offering to subscribers, which would allow them to enable HD video streaming on a day to day basis. While the need to enable HD video streaming originally got knocked down to only once every 30 days, T-Mobile has decided that it will become a one-time affair in the future, requiring customers to opt-in to streaming HD video only once, after which they will be able to continue streaming HD video as long as there are no changes to their plan.
Previously, the T-Mobile ONE plan did not include HD streaming at all, while the upgraded T-Mobile ONE Plus plan sported HD streaming day passes, requiring users to turn the feature on once per day in their account settings. While this enabled unlimited HD video streaming in theory, it was only present on the higher tier, and required customers to go into their account settings to turn on the feature daily, which could easily be forgotten or become a pain over time. When the recent change to the T-Mobile ONE plan lineup brought unlimited video streaming down to the base plan, it also brought over the day passes, which is what T-Mobile is getting rid of once and for all.
Those who have been watching T-Mobile for a while will be glad to finally see what seems to be the end of the sordid saga of Binge On. The service traded zero-rated video for lower-quality streams, which some argued was achieved not by downsampling the stream, but by throttling customer data speeds while video was being streamed, resulting in some problems. The Net Neutrality implications were obvious, though the FCC, under new management, recently dropped the investigation and many similar ones. Concerns over customers having to opt-in to streaming HD video rather than opt out are still valid, but much less so now that there is no reason not to do so aside from simply not being aware of the toggle.