Phone company to offer Cable?

[queonda]

This is old news but just heard about it the other day. Don't know much about it, but does anyone know how far away this is of becoming reality?

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061001-7873.html

I've heard verizon FiOS for some of you in other states. Do you need cable boxes for all your tvs or will you tv tuners work just fine? I know directtv/dish doesn't.

[bnflaherty]

AT&T is rolling this type of service -- IPTV -- out in select states.

Frankly -- I looked at their "bundles" -- which include Internet and TV (ONLY) the best package being all the channels and "high speed" DSL -- a whopping 6MB / 1MB -- and I think the grand total was something like 140 /month.

Contrast that with my current cable provider -- 10/1 for the internet and all the channels -- for roughly the same price -- except that the TV is Not over IP...

Once they get the pricing and performance issues up to par with cable and exceed them -- then they should be good to go...

But seeing as I use VOIP (the whole reason for dropping the phone company in the first place) ---- switching TO DSL from cable... is a bit ridiculous..

[signcarver]

I've had similar service from qwest (VDSL) for years... just recently switched (about a year ago) to cable because of their delay in offering HD content. A few months after I switched they added HD so I might go back.

One of the biggest problems I had was its ability to tune only three streams at once per box (I think it was originally 4 streams but then they canceled one) and a limit of two boxes... the default one box configuration would output one stream on channel 4, another on 7 (or 10) and the third on 13. You get three rf remotes, each controlling its own channel... no ir remote capability so that ruled out an ir blaster so if I wanted to record 3 shows at once, I would have to use each remote and manually add the programs for the box to tune to the correct station at the right time, then tell the vcr or pvr to record that channel, hopefully remembering which remote was used...

I believe their new hd tuner either has 2 or 3 sd streams but only the attached hd tv can view the hd stream... or at least in hd. What is really needed is the ability to output the the HD stream by either qam or atsc so it could be viewed by any hd tv in the house (all my hd tv's support qam). I think while looking at the hdhomerun I came across something stating that there used to be a chip that did this for a satellite provider's hd box but was quickly removed for drm reasons

[myktek]

AT&T is rolling out Uverse, which is a combination of VOIP, IPTV and DSL...