AT&T U-Verse Catching Up

Today, AT&T announced that their U-verse video service would be adding whole-home video watching from a single PVR to up to 8 televisions. Hooray! As a consumer, it's always great to have a choice, and until now, Dish was pretty much the only service-provider game in town when it came to whole-home PVR. Now, if they'd only add the ability to expand the hard-drive capacity via USB, and compatibility with portable viewers like the Archos players, we'd have a real horse race.

As a long-time user of the Dish Network VIP-622 PVR, this has been one of the features missing for me in the AT&T offering. Being able to program only one PVR and have it available on both of our TV's has been a great convenience. Dish network took a rather simple, but effective approach to multi-room PVR viewing. They have an output on their PVR that essentially broadcasts a second viewing experience including user interface, audio and video on a cable TV channel. By connecting that output to a coax cable running to a second TV, you can access all of the PVR's recorded shows on that other TV. This approach has some advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, there's no set-top box required at the second TV. On the minus side, it only works for standard definition viewing, because the channel it sends is a standard-definition analog TV signal. The control from the second TV is via an RF wireless remote control. In principle, that should work fine, but in practice, we find that it doesn't go through stucco walls very well, and we're often contorting our bodies to achieve the right positioning of the remote to get the key clicks heard by the PVR. Still, it's been fantastic to only have one PVR to record, and have the whole collection of video available in two rooms at once.

The new AT&T approach is different. They require a simple IP set top box for each of the TV's that will be accessing the PVR, but those were necessary to view the U-verse service anyway. Because the remote controls are communicating with those set top boxes, there's not likely to be any problem with remote control range like there is with the Dish Network PVR. The AT&T U-verse solution also covers up to 8 TV's which will probably matter to some folks, though we're a bit backward having only two. I'm still on the fence about trying the service because I'm always running out of hard-drive space, and the Dish solution allows an extra hard drive to be installed via USB while the AT&T solution does not. I've also used the Archos PocketDish players with the Dish network, and liked them. Again, I don't think AT&T U-verse has anything to match this. Still, if they were able to add multi-room, maybe it's just a matter of time. In their press release, Jeff Weber, AT&T VP of video products says "With our 100 percent IP network, we are able to constantly evolve features and services to match the needs of viewers." So, I guess we'll have to watch to see if they deliver on that promise.