Wooot!
Man, I love being assimilated. Now ATT and BellSouth are getting some DSL thing going too :/
Jesus, it’s worse than I thought. The commercial made it sound like ATT/BS were collaborating on some DSL thing, but no…
AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) and BellSouth Corporation (NYSE:BLS) announced today an agreement to merge the two companies, a combination that will create a more effective and efficient provider in the wireless, broadband, video, voice and data markets.
The merger will streamline the ownership and operations of Cingular Wireless, which is jointly owned by AT&T and BellSouth. The new company will be more innovative, nimble and efficient, providing benefits to customers by combining the Cingular, BellSouth and AT&T networks into a single fully integrated wireless and wireline Internet Protocol network offering a full range of advanced solutions.
As a result, the combined company will be better able to speed the convergence of new and improved services for consumers and businesses, and embrace the industry’s shift to Internet Protocol network-based technologies.
The Tivo Comcast software will come at an additional fee, sigh…
Comcast just bought up my local TimeWarner affiliate and did away with online billpay. Same account, new corporate overlords, and I’ve gotta mail in the checks. Maybe I’ll set up an autopay through my bank. This will be a huge disincentive against using their on-demand movie service now - I hadn’t been to Blockbuster in months before this!
I don’t care - if it will stop my wife from begging me to plunk down $800 to buy a HD Tivo, it’s worth it! Great news IMHO.
Does this mean that Comcast + Tivo will now give me all of the capability of my DirectTV + DirectTivo? Being able to record two channels simultaneously, watch a recorded show while recording two others, Season Passes, Wishlists, etc?
I might investigate switching if so. I currently have Comcast as a “basic” service, just there in case the DirectTV goes out for some reason. DirectTV for 99.9% of our TV watching. I haven’t investigated how Comcast stands compared to DTV for programming options, PPV, etc. Also, I do notice that my local network channels on Comcast are a lot worse quality that the same channels on DTV.
They already announced this back in 2005. It’s not clear – is it actually available now? It’s been ‘out in 6 months’ for years now.
I have Adelphia which has since been assimilated into Comsast, and the PVR they give you does most of this - albeit in a much more sucky way. Of what you list above, the only think I don’t think it has are Wishlists. Plus the channel guide and general UI suck compared to Tivo (well, no thumbs up/ down either, if that matters to you).
I wish my cable provider would offer this, as I moved out of Comcast’s area when I left the SF bay area. :(
Right now I’m using an 80 hour Series 2 Dual Tuner, and I’ve got another year and a half left on my service contract for it. I would love to upgrade up to a Series 3 HD TiVo but the price is just way too high still. $650 is still the lowest I’ve seen it going for anywhere, and until it drops below $300 I’m not going to consider it.
Instead I’m thinking about getting an HD box from my cable company and the DVR, so I can watch live HD with pause and fast-forward (sigh no commercial skip) and record particular shows (although in the past I’ve noticed that trying to record a full season of something is totally broken on generic DVR boxes).
Yeah, the main problem with generic DVRs is that they don’t keep any sense of a schedule. All they understand is whether or not the program is 1st run or not. It’s good for timeshifting, but not for any real archival purposes. Unfortunately the picture quality (so much better than the analog channels) has totally broken me from analog DVRs and I don’t want to spend $650+ for functionality I pretty much already have.
Weren’t HTPCs supposed to fix this problem? (Yeah, it still pisses me off that I can’t buy a cable-capable DVR card or 7 and run my own software/hard drives.)
We’re going to end up with an AT&T monopoly again, aren’t we? Except with no regulation.
More or less. The AT&T/BellSouth merger should put us about back to the pre-baby bell split.
circle of life, baby.
A telecom monopoly is almost irrelevant at this point since the cable companies have gotten into the home phone game as well.
Now a resurgent AT&T buying up all the cable companies, that would be bad.
This Comcast/Tivo partnership has been announced ages ago and keeps getting pushed back. I thought they were going to allow the software to be downloaded seamlessly. I hope that the technitian that sets up the Tivo puts in a bigger hard drive because that’s my biggest gripe with the Motorola DVR now.