Speaking of DVRs…
I’ve really been digging my AT&T U-Verse service and I’m glad I signed up. The set-top box that comes with the service has a DVR capability supporting roughly 120 hours of recorded TV. I hope I never fill it up because slugging through that much content would be a real pain.
What AT&T U-Verse Does Well
Schedule DVR online
You can schedule your DVR online by logging into your AT&T U-Verse account. It’s not particularly easy to find and should be much more conveniently exposed. I have it setup as a secondary tab on my Yahoo account’s portal homepage (which I rarely ever use). This feature has proved to be extremely convenient and useful. Katie will ask me to set something up while I’m working in our office and I don’t have to head over to the TV, turn on all the entertainment system devices and add the recording. With just a few clicks on my computer, I’m done.
Decent UI
For anyone who has used Microsoft’s Media Center over the years, the color scheme, channel guide presentation and other widgets will immediately seem familiar. It’s a pretty decent UI that has clarity and makes good use of overlays. It could still use some work and my opinion is hindered by not having extensively used a TiVo. That said, I’ve rarely found myself at a loss for how to navigate to what I need to get to on the device.
Compact packaging and silent performance
Media in the home has been suffering from “YASTBS”, aka Yet Another Set-Top Box Syndrome, and TV service is no different. The box for AT&T U-verse is aesthetically pleasing, occupies a very small footprint compared to my old Comcast box, and performs pretty quietly inspite of having a hard drive inside it. The one thing I wish they added was a clock on the front that also doubled to show the channel you’re on.
Channel flipping speed
One of the big knocks on IPTV used to be the time it took to change channels. I can say without a doubt that channel changing is significantly faster on my U-Verse service than it was on my “digital” Comcast service. I’d say it takes 20% of the time to change channels on U-Verse as compared to Comcast, so that’s a huge technical and user experience win for AT&T and Microsoft.
Storage space
For some people, 120 hours will seem like not much and I’m sure it’s a small fraction of that for HD content. But for now, as I am stuck with a big old CRT SDTV, 120 hours of SD recording capability is more than ample and I find myself adding roughly one series per week to follow.
Areas for Improvement
In spite of several things that are done well by U-Verse, there are still some nagging things that need to be improved.
Streaming over the network
AT&T is happy to stream content to other set-top boxes throughout your residence they provide you (at an additional cost). The kicker is that the set-top boxes need to be connected via cat5 (no wireless) and you can’t use any other device, including your laptops or desktops. This doesn’t really make a lot of sense. If they’re worried about people ripping content off the DVR, they could just as easily stream to some DRM-friendly media player that you install on your laptop/desktop.
Streaming to your mobile device
I recently got an iPhone 3G and would love to be able to stream TV off my DVR a la Slingbox. This would be a very slick feature that addresses the need of “what I want, when I want it, how I want it” that many mobile video solutions are lacking now.
Better free “On-Demand” library
Comcast had a pretty solid On Demand library, with lots of network TV content. AT&T needs to beef up their library significantly to compete in this area.
Combined billing nightmare
So if you are an AT&T U-Verse customer and a AT&T Wireless customer, you can combine your bills so instead of dealing with two payment systems you can just pay one bill and be done with it. What they neglect to tell you clearly is that if you do this, it will take 2-3 billing cycles (read: 60-90 days) before your bills are synch’d up. This means you can go on your merry way, paying the AT&T U-Verse amount until BAM! 2-3 months of wireless bills are stacked up and billed to you at once.
That in and of itself kind of sucks, but it gets worse if during that period of time, you become eligible for a phone upgrade and decide to take advantage like I did earlier this week. You cannot qualify for discount pricing on your upgrade if your wireless bill is in a “past due” state. Guess what? With combined billing, it will happen inevitably as AT&T Wireless removes the option of directly paying your account from the online account manager. You need to directly call some AT&T office and have them post a payment to that account and even then, there are no guarantees it will be applied properly or show up in a timely fashion.
I spent a good 4-5 hours on Monday dealing with AT&T, either on the phone or in the store getting this situation resolved. Even then I was not able to get both my lines upgraded, just one. Any time I would have saved over the course of the year with combined billing was more than wiped out and in the process I ended up over paying my wireless account two or three times over to ensure it was not past due.
DVR settings
There are 3 similar but not obviously clear settings for recording a series. They are record “New Show Only”, “New Shows and Reruns”, and “New Shows and Reruns Once a Day”. It turns out the middle setting is the most optimal to guarantee you get new recordings of shows like The Daily Show and Colbert Report, which air multiple times per day, but in different descriptions of “new” and “re-run”. This should be cleared up and made much simpler for end-users so they don’t have to learn with a trial by error.