One of the interesting things about the whole wireless internet, IPTV, television on demand era of telecommunication technology is the fact that, more and more, the hardware and the service are going hand in hand.
The cell phone you bought ten years ago, you’d have to get service separately without exception. Today, you have that option, but many phones and other devices come with the service.
It’s sort of like in our grandparents’ age, when you would buy phone service from AT&T and they would provide you with the telephone as well. The difference being that, today, if you broke that phone, you wouldn’t actually owe AT&T for the replacement costs!
One of the newest such hardware/service integrated products would have to be the AT&T U-Verse Total Home DVR.
The aim of this service is to provide the user with the “only home DVR you’ll ever need!” That’s what the company’s website says, anyways. We’re here to look into this and see if that’s really the case. So let’s see how it ranks in terms of…
Convenience
Total Home DVR allows you to record any standard or high definition programming on one set in your house and watch it anywhere else in your house. That’s pretty handy if you ever, say, want to record a cooking show on the fly and watch it in the kitchen later.
Channel Lineup
The official website only says that they have an “extensive” lineup, but if you use the DVR with U-Verse’s TV service, you get one hundred twenty HD channels as well as hundreds of standard def channels, and you can get all the premium channels like HBO and Showtime in a single package, so that’s really not a bad deal at all.
Reliability
Consistency is a major problem with many DVR setups. ATT Uverse uses internet protocol television which can be kind of up and down depending on the provider. Looking at a handful of reviews, though, U-verse tends to be pretty consistent, so you won’t wind up missing out on the series finale of your favorite show thanks to a light rain storm or anything.
All in all, it seems to be a pretty good package deal. “The only DVR you’ll ever need!” may be just a BIT of a stretch, simply because we can’t say where the technology will be ten years from now and whether or not AT&T will keep up with it, but what we can say is that it’s the only DVR program you need RIGHT NOW, and that ain’t bad.
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