Randmness

Last week my fiance and I got a new addition to the household. No, it’s not a baby – it’s better. We got hooked up for AT&T’s U-Verse. For those of you that haven’t heard of it yet U-Verse is a new video service from AT&T that is like cable or satellite, only better.

It’s a pretty neat service; instead of coming in to our house through a cable line from the pole or from the satellite dish U-Verse comes into our house through our DSL.  The setup is almost the same as a cable or satellite only the TV channels come in through the DSL line to a special router (this 4 port router replaces the current router you might have in your house but does have a built in antenna in case you have a wireless network) and can then be sent to the TV box with either network cable (they’ll run the cable for you for no extra charge) or by using the current cable wiring in the house.

The  U-Verse TV box is smaller than a digital cable box and about the same size as a DirecTV box. With most of their plans you get a free DVR and DVR service for no extra charge, up to 3 TV boxes at no extra charge, and a ton of channels. I think the coolest thing about the service is that you can schedule your DVR recordings from your cell phone (if you have AT&T service) or online. That’s right, all you have to do is log in to Yahoo from any computer using your account information and click on the U-Verse icon. From there you’ll get a complete TV Channel lineup for the next two weeks. If you see something you want to record you just click on the listing and follow the easy instructions and BAM! it’ll be recorded.  The only stipulation is that you setup the recording at least a half an hour before it’s scheduled to come on.

Because this is a new service provided by AT&T it’s going to take a while before it’s rolled out everywhere. There are also a few hiccups that need to be  sorted out. One problem is, just like a regular router, the U-Verse router needs to be unplugged and replugged once every other week. It isn’t too much of a hassle, and you can even do it from the router settings page if you dial into from a PC on your home network. I also noticed that some of the on-demand menus (there are TONS of free music videos from the IMF channel and shows from various networks available) aren’t as complete as they should be, making it hard to find shows or channels.  On one last sore note at the moment you’re only able to watch HD channels on one TV at a time. If you were to turn the TV to an HD channel while another TV was on an HD channel an error message would come up telling you that the HD option was already in use.

Despite the hiccups I’ve seen the service all together looks promising. Because the service is utilizing high speed internet for it’s programming and TV boxes new updates and features are added regularly. From what I hear a feature to watch shows recorded on the DVR box from any TV box on the network is going to rolling out soon, along with the option to have more boxes on the network and more HD channels streaming at once.

So far I’ve had a positive experience; whenever I’ve needed to talk to tech support they’ve been very nice to me, the install for the service was a breeze and the tech that came out to do it was very nice and made sure that I understood all of the controls and services that were available through U-Verse.

If you want to see more about the service check out the U-Verse website here :

https://uverse1.att.com/ 

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 9:13 pm and is filed under TV, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.