Uverse redux

Now that I've lived with ATT's Uverse service for a few months, I thought it would be good to do a quick update...

First, the service hasd been remarkably reliable, with only a handful of outages (mostly on the HD channels) lasting a few minutes. After Comcast, having a cable service that's up 24/7 is a nice change of pace.

Second, ATT is obviously serious about updating and expanding service, such as the Big 10 football network, a series of 10 cable channels covering said conference (one of them HD). And you gotta love BBC America if you're a MI5 or Doctor Who fan . More changes are on the way, which leads us to...

Third, ATT seems to have an odd definition of programming "upgrades". One of these improvements is the elmination of all west coast feeds. That's about 20 channels, and its quite convenient when you're channel surfing and catch a glimpse of something you want to watch from the beginning--just see if its on the west coast feed. I'll miss that.

Fourth, ATT has dropped their digital music channels for the MTV/Microsoft "Urge" programming. Needless to say, MTV seems to have no room for Gospel or Contemporary Christian music (no surprise there). I give this "Urge" marketing thing about 18 months before everybody bails.

Fifth, and this is not completely their fault, but Microsofts's CE OS takes an unbearably long time to boot, and the router/access point can't initialize if the set top boxes are trying to download their code. This means that a minor power glitch (common in our neighborhood) can take down the system until you spend the 45 minutes to manually bring it up. So each STB in our house now has a UPS attached to it. This is the kind of system flaw that makes grown engineers weep and wail.
(edit)
In other system flaws, MS CE can't manage the hard drive well at all. I've recorded at least a dozen programs that play back as either a black screen or just 3 frames of a program. Sometimes you can get the program back by rebooting the system (a 10 minute chore) but other times its just taking up drive space for no good reason. More proof that MS CE is no substitute for TIVO.

Sixth, and I'm kinda picky about this, but the channels are over compressed. Most people could live wiht it, but I can spot a compression artifact a mile away, and it makes some sporting events unbearable to watch. The HD channels aer better.

Seventh, and not exactly a flaw, but the room to room DVR functions aren't ready yet.


Bottom line, its still been worth the change from Comcast, and the flaws are either livable or can be worked around (for $50 in UPS hardware). So if you have ATT IPTV in your neighborhood, its worth checking out.

Happy channel suring.