AT&T to Offer Multiroom DVR in Second Half

AT&T has confirmed that it will begin providing a multiroom DVR feature with its U-verse IPTV package in the second half of this year, while telco TV rival Verizon Communications Inc. already sells such an offering with FiOS TV.

A senior AT&T executive said at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January that the capability would be rolled out in the coming weeks. However, an AT&T spokesperson said that whole-home DVR won’t be out until an unspecified time in the second half of this year, and on a market-by-market basis.

Multiroom, or whole-home, DVR functionality enables residents to harness the functionality of a DVR in multiple rooms at the same time, and without requiring a DVR in each room of the dwelling.

One suggested reason for the confirmed rollout timing is the fact that AT&T’s U-verse service can not yet support two concurrent streams of high-definition (HD) video to a dwelling, which prevents customers from, for example, watching a show in HD and recording one on a DVR at the same time. AT&T plans to support two concurrent HD streams later this year.

Another possible obstacle could be the lack of solid standards for home networking needed to support the service. Verizon product executives have said that they had hoped to offer their service based on a specification from the Digital Living Network Alliance, but opted not to wait and filled in the blanks with their own secret sauce.

The runaway popularity of DVRs, especially HD versions, has driven interest in multiroom capabilities. However, the prices of these units have not dropped enough to enable most homeowners to justify purchasing them.

Industry experts note that the popularity of DVRs, which are sold largely on convenience benefits, rose last year as service providers enable customers to program remotely the units using the Web of select mobile devices.

The ability of TiVo Inc. DVRs to receive movies directly from Internet movie destinations greatly broadens the universe of sources from which content can be accessed for viewing on a TV. The DVR pioneer has been working long and hard to evolve the DVR, and the company itself, well beyond a box. It’s been working with large cable operators to develop software that includes DVR functionality, as well as set-top box (STB) functions, in the STB.

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