After years of bombarding us with commercials depicting happy customers transferring video between their television, PC and mobile phone, AT&T has finally delivered its first true “three-screens” product. The new version of its U-verse mobile app allows iPhone customers to watch programming on their handsets, not just browse their channel guides and manage their DVRs.
As with other bandwidth-hogging apps, AT&T is limiting the downloaded video to Wi-Fi connections, keeping the network-busting traffic off of 3G, but it isn’t charging anything for the service beyond the usual iPhone subscription and U-verse programming fees — though it is limiting access to U-verse customers with a 300-or-more-channel package. And while the popular iPhone is the initial platform for the app, AT&T said it plans to extend it to other smartphone platforms in the future.
AT&T didn’t reveal a detailed list of what programming would be available, but it said many popular shows would be in the menu. It doesn’t look like customers will get access to the content on their DVRs, though — the downloads instead coming from a library of programs stored on AT&T’s network. So if you’ve saved all 168 hours of the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week,” don’t expect to be able to access it with your iPhone.
Connected Planet’s Take,
Kevin Fitchard:
This service doesn’t establish a direct link between a customer’s DVR and the iPhone’s media player. Nor does it allow someone to beam their live U-verse programming onto their handsets a la Slingbox — but I doubt anyone would have expected either of those scenarios. This is AT&T’s first attempt to take some of the TV content it sells in the home and extend to the wider world (though limited to the wider world of Wi-Fi). And considering it’s doing it absolutely gratis, I doubt any customers will dwell on the could-have-beens of the service.
Most significantly it seems to be the first acknowledgment on AT&T’s part that if you pay for content on one of its platforms, it will distribute it to all of its other platforms. This is really more of a mobile on-demand service, than a mobile DVR, per se, but as more TV content moves into network for streaming and downloading, the need for the personalized DVR will go away. You could can argue that an application like mobile U-verse will probably only hasten the DVR’s demise. If the idea is to recorded programming to multiple devices over multiple networks, then localizing that content at the endpoints or a single network makes little sense.
What’s most interesting about this app, though, is it creates two conflicting business models for TV programming downloads on the same device. AT&T many not see any revenue from downloads of iTunes TV programs, so there are no conflicts among its own interests, but there may be plenty of conflicts with its partner Apple. It will be interesting to see if some of the shows AT&T will send out for free are the same ones that Apple sells for a buck or two a pop. I suspect there won’t be much overlap — at least not yet.
That’s our take on this. Let us know what you think in the comments section below:
You are implying I can transfer between my uVerse DVR and a PC, but my at&t store and help desk claim it is not possible.