AT&T TV

Advertisements

You're one person I don't know. I've now quoted several people I don't know on reddit. They outnumber you. (And you've already admitted that you're unsure what the live TV buffer was back when you were under the AT&T TV brand before you switched to AT&T TV Now. The folks I've quoted on reddit seem pretty certain of their claims.)

 

People on Reddit are often very certain of what they post, and sometimes they are even right! But I’ve also noticed that many are not as right as they think they are.

That said, my solution has always worked flawlessly. With the Osprey remote I have one-button recording, so I just hit that then I can pause to my heart’s content!

 

Off to a roaring start - there's one inch or so of snow on the ground, so of course I get a "Due to a weather concern in your area, we are unable to deliver your AT&T order..." e-mail. God forbid a delivery man has to go out in the winter in Chicago!

I'm calling a local store to see if I can pick my stuff up there instead.

 

Which of the usual 'fulfilment' vendors weren't wanting to venture out today? Usually a request similar to yours wouldn't be fulfilled locally. Good luck!

 

Advertisements

Not sure, the website to reschedule said "powered by Enjoy" but I don't know if that's an actual delivery service or if they're like Uber-style contractors.

Anyway, the store was the way to go - went in, got 4 boxes, am now home. Only downside is I'll have to reconfigure my series recordings because they had to make a new account

 

So now there's a return to deal with?

 

Well, a cancellation. I haven't taken delivery of the online ordered hardware - guy said I should call in and cancel, and I'd get refunded the sales tax.

So far the new system seems to be working quite well. Picture quality is ace - far better than the crap I got with Comcast. Total bill roughly 110 per month - will go up a bit after the first year (guy in store signed me up for the contract plan - but he also gave me a year of Cinemax, Epix and Showtime for the trouble of the cancelled order) - so I guess it's a wash at the end of the two year term. Besides, like I said, I'm less worried about monthly cost - I'd rather pay for quality.

 

Congrats. Would you mind doing a test of the live buffer? Just tune to a channel and pause for about 90 minutes, then resume. Let us know if resume jumps forward to live or if it actually resumes where you paused it and gives you a full 90 minute buffer where you can ffwd/rew at will.

There are mixed reports about the buffer. Some claim that while you can pause for 90 minutes, the buffer is actually only about 2 minutes. Others claim the buffer really is 90 minutes. Back when I had the service, I could pause for 90 minutes, but the buffer was only 2 minutes. It would be nice to know if this has changed.

Thanks in advance.

 

I can do a full 90 minute test later, but I know it works for at least 10 minutes, as I left it paused that long on my frontroom TV yesterday when I let the dog out and checked the laundry.

Only issue is that so far, both my masterbed and frontroom boxes have crashed out once during the transition from the weird AT&T advertising screensaver to the real Google screensaver. I chalked that up to the usual Android stretching-it's-legs during the first few days of active use.

This crash causes the AT&T TV app to reload, losing your buffer (and dumping out to Live TV if you were on a recording)

 

How 'impressed' is Father?

 

He prefers the remote compared to the XR15 (which isn't a high bar, though). He also likes the better PQ, and fewer cables in his room (his box is wireless to a new AP in my bedroom, I threw that in there when I was tearing out all the X1 stuff.)

 

Only one minor issue so far: the password.
I attempted to sign in to my new account with the temporary credentials given by the in-store rep – it worked but made me set a new password. No password I tried worked. It kept failing – mostly giving me useless “Failed to set password – system password” warnings. Eventually, I got a useful error “User ID, phone number or name cannot be in password”. Turns out, since my e-mail is a@lastname.me, the letter “a” is considered my User ID – which means I cannot use any password that contains the letter “A” in it. Oy.

 

Crashes on the Osprey box are not at all uncommon I’ve found. Oft times just exiting another app on the box causes it. I’ve not had mine crash from that idiot ad yet though.

 

Can you go into the box's Android TV settings menu and increase the amount of time until the Google screen saver kicks in? If you could set it at, say, 60 minutes, then you'd probably rarely trigger a crash.

 

Doesn’t seem to be any way to set the delay before it does the screen saver, just on or off.

The good with the Osprey is that after it has been in use for awhile, it gets a bit speedier until the next time you do a restart/reset. Right after either of those it can be a real pig!

 

HTML:

https://thestreamable.com/news/att-tv-adds-unlimited-dvr-and-in-home-streaming-for-contract-plans-add-on-for-no-contract-customers

The forum software would not let me insert that as a link for some reason. Kept getting converted to media.

 

Ace, that takes care of one of my major complaints (3 in-home limit).

Other than that, 1.5 weeks in, I'm happy. PQ is great. Only one day had weird buffering problems, and that was only on one channel. Switching channels up and back down again seemed to fix it (pulled a fresh stream from a different server, maybe?)

Only two things still outstanding on my "complaint" list - no remote finder (would be nice), and astonishing lack of fine-grained recording control (let me only keep one of a show, please - I don't care about saving last night's news) - but I think the second issue may be moot with "unlimited" DVR - if I don't have to save space, I can just let the news shows back up until they hit the 90 day expiration.

 

Today my Osprey boxes got an update dated Feb 4. The results are real speed improvements. Nothing else spotted.

DVR - Nice to see the unlimited DVR space. Not sure if my grandfathered ATT TV Now Max will get it later this month though as the articles are not clear on that. For me, the 500 hours I have is more than enough.

DVR - management of scheduled recordings is a mess until you figure out how, and then it is just a little less of a mess.

Profiles - This is the one big feature that I think is missing. And no indication that ATT is considering it.