My World, Delivered

By 3Screens.net's Alan Weinkrantz

In May 2008, I started my third year as an AT&T (T) three screens customer.

Don’t confuse this term with triple play. They are much different. By three screens, I mean my TV, my PC and my wireless device services are all provided by the phone company as we no longer know it, good old AT&T.

My first re-introduction to the new AT&T (or what was SBC) was through its U-verse IPTV service. I was not only a trial user of the U-verse, but also a witness to the reinvention and disruption of an important American business icon. Also, living in San Antonio, where AT&T was headquartered (note: in July the company announced its move to Dallas), I had access to engineers and internal employees who would talk off the record to me, giving me insights on the deployment of the service.

Two years and four months later, I now have a true, IP triple play offering in my home. I have HD IPTV, through U-verse TV, IP voice through U-verse Voice and of course broadband wireless in the home.

The most recent update to my service is the availability of Total Home DVR. Finally, I am getting multiple HD streams and something very cool: the ability to stop a program and move it to another room.

In addition to having U-verse in my home, I also have AppleTV. I can watch YouTube videos, rent movies from Apple instead of AT&T and port them to my notebook or iPhone for when I travel. I can also log on to my Flickr account and turn my big screen TV into a rotating slide show of my photos.

With the advent of Total Home DVR, there’s another benefit, which may not seem obvious now, but in the future it could be a very powerful and disruptive force for a telco like AT&T. Because of the HomePNA standard, which AT&T has embraced, I now have a small-scale, enterprise-quality network in my home. You see, AT&T is now my home-based CIO, providing guaranteed quality of service, the ability to remotely diagnose my network, provide protection from the bad guys with a firewall, load new feature upgrades while I am sleeping, and a pretty good support desk when I need to “reach out and touch someone” via an 800 number.

Overall, I am really pleased with AT&T’s U-verse family offering and the level of IP-based services I am getting at home. Coupled with my iPhone, I really think I’ve got the best of breed for my business and family’s needs. There is one area in which AT&T really falls short: I think their retail stores, and specifically their Experience stores, are at best, mundane.

Compare the user experience in the Experience store to that of an Apple store, and there is just no comparison. No, I am not proposing that AT&T hire a bunch of young and hip twenty-somethings to man a Genius Bar. I am simply saying that AT&T should re-think its retail strategy and re-think the realities about the millions of users who are disconnecting their traditional landlines.

AT&T’s Experience stores could ─ and should ─ be more than just retail stores to sell products and services. Like Apple, AT&T could start teaching its current and prospective customers not only how to consume broadcast and web media, but how to create their own content, build a community and develop social media initiatives – all on AT&T’s network.

In a little more than two years, the phone company as we no longer know it has come quite a ways. By year-end, AT&T is expected to have 1 million homes installed with U-verse. That’s when a critical mass of home-based enterprise networks could begin to shape a new paradigm in the evolution of the American family’s way of consuming and creating communications and entertainment services.

Alan Weinkrantz is the publisher and editor of 3Screens.net, an independent guide for making the most of the AT&T three-screen experience. He is also president of Alan Weinkrantz and Co., a technology public relations and social media consulting firm.

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