The plan was one of several insights that Verizon Wireless CTO Tony Melone provided at the Open Mobile Summit in San Francisco. The carrier is on track to launch LTE (Long-Term Evolution) in and across its whole current 3G coverage area by the end of 2013, Melone said. He and other speakers said growing demand for video poses one of the biggest challenges in the mobile world.

"We're working with all of our infrastructure providers ... to develop the technology to incorporate a broadcast capability. To evoke that, you have to dedicate a portion of your spectrum. So a portion of your capacity would have to be allocated to this broadcast capability," Melone said during a panel discussion. "We think that will be a solution to this problem down the road, that there will be a broadcast element to our 4G network that can then more efficiently deal with the live content."

Broadcasting requires less capacity per user if many subscribers want to watch the same content at the same time, because the carrier can send out just one stream of content to many users instead of a separate one for each user. There are mechanisms for broadcasting and for multicasting, another resource-conserving way of distributing content, built into LTE, according to Nokia Siemens Networks CTO Hossein Moiin, who also spoke on the panel.

Mobile TV and live video broadcasts have a checkered history. Carriers have had limited success selling TV services to their subscribers, and Qualcomm is , which broadcast over a dedicated network to devices equipped to work with its specific frequencies.

Qualcomm has also suggested it is looking to sell its FLO TV spectrum, which comes from former TV channels. Earlier on Monday, Verizon's Melone said his company is not interested in buying those spectrum licenses.