Verizon’s New Jersey headquarters is a complicated place. Part bunker, part weirdly Buddhist sanctuary, it housed the original AT&T before the government cut it up into little pieces, half of which became Verizon, and half of which have congealed back together, T-1000 style, into Verizon’s biggest competitor. I’m told when Verizon moved in, the exorcism cost millions. That’s partly the reason they brought me out: To exorcise the notion that AT&T is winning the race to change the way you watch television. Verizon showed me a new version of FiOS TV that will start rolling out to customers any day now, and hitting everyone by end of the year, with a feature set rivals that AT&T’s U-Verse, including interactive content, PC connectivity, RSS feeds, even the ability to see what your neighbours are watching in realtime. galleryPost('vzfiosnew', 3, '');
The video labs at AT&T’s Atlanta HQ are not located on the higher floors of its 47-story Midtown Centre where, between demos, you can casually scrape a view of the city through giant windows. You know, where you might expect to see the future of TV. Instead, they’re buried down on the second floor in a building a few doors down, in a plain grey room, whose only exceptional attribute is a wall of TVs–eight total including two 60-inchers–which are hooked up to experimental U-verse IPTV DVR boxes. In this room, sitting on the single blue-green couch, you can stare up and see the future–TV-to-phone video calling, iPhones as remote controls, on-screen visual voicemail, MST3K-style chat while viewing and more–TV as you will hopefully know it in the next couple of years.
AT&T is nixing the agreement they’ve had with Dish TV since 2003 to sell their satellite TV service as part of a triple play bundle with internet and voice. Some are speculating it’s because AT&T is simply down on satellite TV (it’s got its own U-verse IPTV thing after all), but more likely it’s pitting Dish and DirecTV against each other in a bidding war, since U-verse deployment ain’t exactly a runaway train speed-wise. So, realistically, you could see AT&T hawking DirecTV instead of Dish next year, which would be a blow to to the latter, since they’re already little number two. But maybe AT&T will be super ballsy and push off satellite altogether. [Info Week]
If you still rock the bunny ears we salute you. But odds are, you probably get TV one of two ways: Cable or satellite. There’s a newer way: IP, that is Internet Protocol, TV–in this case, the TV delivered over the internet by your phone company. Verizon and AT&T push FiOS TV and U-Verse, respectively, in select regions of the country where their fibre networks have been built out. In a lot of ways, it’s the TV of the future–in part because most of you can’t get it yet. Beyond that, the technology that delivers it to your home, as well as who is doing the delivering, opens up some pretty sweet new interactive possibilities. And even for regular old boob tubing, the way it’s architected means its good for HD buffs. AU: This is very US-centric, but it’s still an interesting read for anybody interested in what the future might hold…
