AT&T has finally, after almost 4 years of banging on about it, delivered on its promise to bring to market an HD DVR that can be viewed on any compatible TV in the home.
The U-verse Total Home DVR is being introduced in the San Francisco Bay Area at no additional charge and is planned for deployment to all U-verse TV customers by the end of 2008.
The devices are said to be able to offer play, pause, rewind and fast forward on any recorded SD or HD program on up to seven additional U-verse-connected TVs in the home. The device can record 4 programs at once and three of these can be HD. There must be five tuners in the set tops because another live channel can be watched at the same time.
The new devices will also allow the pausing of a program in one room and picking up where you left off in another room. The same show can be watched out of phase (at different start times) in other rooms from the same recording.
The device will record 37 hours of HD content or 133 hours of SD, and can be set from any web connected PC or mobile handset through AT&T Yahoo!
The idea of a whole home DVR was first touted by Microsoft in its roadmap in 2004 and was supposed to be ready shortly after the U-Verse launch in 2006. AT&T says it plans to add the ability to schedule recordings and pause or control live TV from non-DVR receivers connected to the whole home DVR. The DVR can come in Motorola or Cisco Scientific Atlanta versions and runs the Microsoft Mediaroom software.