AT&T U-VERSE INTRODUCES TOTAL HOME DVR, TAKING

‘WHEN YOU WANT, WHERE YOU WANT’ TV VIEWING

TO WHOLE NEW LEVEL

Latest U-verse TV Enhancement — Made Possible by IP Technology — Enables DVR Playback on Any TV Throughout the Home

DALLAS, Sept. 9, 2008 — DVRs have given customers the flexibility to watch TV programs on their schedules, but limited where the programs can be watched by restricting recorded content to certain TV sets and rooms in the home. Now that’s about to change for AT&T U-verseSM TV customers. Using the power of AT&T’s Internet Protocol (IP) network, families no longer have to plan how or where they watch and record their favorite shows.

AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) today announced the launch of AT&T U-verse Total Home DVR, giving U-verse TV customers the freedom to play back Standard Definition (SD) and High Definition (HD) recorded programs on any connected TV in the home.

U-verse Total Home DVR is now being introduced to customers in the Bay Area at no additional charge and is planned for deployment to all U-verse TV customers by the end of 2008.

“AT&T U-verse is about providing the latest in entertainment and technology for a better TV experience,” said Jeff Weber, AT&T vice president of video products. “With our 100 percent IP network, we are able to constantly evolve features and services to match the needs of viewers. Total Home DVR is the latest addition to our portfolio of unmatched features that give U-verse customers more control, on any TV, at a great price.”

AT&T U-verse Total Home DVR customers can:

• Watch HD and SD DVR recordings on other connected TVs in the home. In addition to your DVR, you can access, play, pause, rewind and fast forward any recorded SD or HD program on up to seven additional U-verse-connected TVs. All U-verse DVRs and receivers are HD-capable.
• Pause a recorded show and pick up where you left off in another room.
• Play back multiple, independent viewings of the same recorded show on different TVs.
• Play back up to four recorded shows at once. Up to three can be HD recorded programs.
• Watch up to five HD programs simultaneously throughout the home, including two live HD programs and three recorded HD programs.
• Record more of the show you want to see with soft padding, which automatically adds 1 minute to the beginning and 2 minutes to the end of each pre-scheduled recording.
• Organize recorded content by series. Series recordings will be grouped as a single heading in the recorded TV menu, making it easier for customers to manage and select their recorded programs.
• Store up to 37 hours of HD content or up to 133 hours of SD content, which is more storage than most cable providers’ DVRs.
• Record up to four programs at once on a single DVR — another feature that is exclusive to AT&T U-verse TV.
• Set the DVR while on the go from your PC or wireless phone. With AT&T Yahoo!® Web and Mobile Remote Access to DVR, you can schedule recordings from any Web-connected PC or compatible mobile phone (wireless service charges apply) by using your AT&T High Speed Internet account.

“While some other providers may claim to offer some form of whole home DVR, AT&T U-verse Total Home DVR is the only one that truly lets you play back recorded programs from a single DVR on any connected TV in the house,” Weber said.

Using IP technology, Total Home DVR capabilities will be seamlessly provided to existing customers’ DVRs without the need to swap their current equipment. The U-verse network architecture and IPTV service allow Total Home DVR functionality to be enabled by a software update, without any action or hassle for existing customers. The updates occur on a market-by-market basis, and existing AT&T U-verse customers in a market will gain the new functionality as their home equipment receives the update.

Total Home DVR is the latest addition to the constantly evolving suite of features that has been introduced to all U-verse TV customers at no extra charge since the AT&T U-verse launch in June 2006. These include:

• Mobile Remote Access to DVR, which lets you schedule and manage DVR recordings from any compatible mobile phone.
• AT&T U-bar, which brings customizable weather, stock, sports and traffic information to the U-verse TV screen, without interrupting the current program.
• AT&T Online Photos from Flickr, which allows you to simply and conveniently browse the photos you've uploaded to flickr.com and watch slide shows on your U-verse TV screen from the comfort of your couch.
• Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Football, which allows you to track the progress of your fantasy team — including current team matchups and league standings — directly from your TV screen through the AT&T U-bar.
• YELLOWPAGES.COM TV, for fast and easy searches to find local businesses and other information via your TV screen.
• AT&T Yahoo! Games, so you can play your favorite online games — including Sudoku, Solitaire, JT’s Blocks, Mah-jongg Tiles and Chess — on the TV screen.

AT&T has also announced today the availability of AT&T U-verse Voice to all U-verse eligible customers in the Bay Area, bringing consumers a next-generation digital voice service with unique integrated features. AT&T U-verse services are currently available to more than 580,000 living units in the greater Bay Area, marking a significant expansion since AT&T U-verse launched locally in December 2006.

In the future, AT&T plans to add to its Total Home DVR service with the ability to schedule recordings and pause or control live TV from non-DVR receivers.

AT&T is deploying next-generation AT&T U-verse services as part of its mission to connect people with their world, everywhere they live and work, and do it better than anyone else. Customers benefit from integrated AT&T services across the three screens they value most: the TV, the PC and the wireless phone.

For additional information on AT&T U-verse — or to find out if it’s available in your area — visit http://uverse.att.com, call 800-ATT-2020 or visit a local AT&T retail location.

There's a chance you won't, actually, see this TV in a few years, at least served up from AT&T. Only 379,000 subscribers are currently hooked up to U-Verse TV, and it's not available to a whole lot more than that. Rollout is slow. But listening to Peter Hill, VP of voice and converged services, talk about what the company is working on for U-verse, you'd never know that everything he was showing me was just for a tiny, privileged sliver of TV viewers. (BTW, for a great hands-on cable vs. U-verse review to see what they're getting, check out this piece.)

The first thing I spot—and ask about—when I walk in is the Xbox 360 on the shelf, a ghostly reminder of the promise of a ubiquitous IPTV box. The status? Microsoft and AT&T have to "come to terms" on it. Whatever that means, but the shaky laughter dotting our exchange implies you'll probably never see it in the States. On to the real show.

Integration is the key to AT&T's IPTV vision—integration with the internet, with your home network and media, integration with AT&T's services. But that doesn't mean TV itself is taking a backseat. Whole home DVR is arriving soon, so that one DVR box will stream content to any and every TV on the network (currently, only the TV directly jacked into the DVR can play back DVR content). You'll totally be able to pause something in one room, and pick it back up in another. With whole-home DVR, the box will be able to simultaneously stream eight feeds to every TV in your house: Three hi-def plus one standard-def stream from the DVR, plus 2 HD and 2 SD streams of live programming. All those TVs are getting all that content from one box. (For the nerds, each HD stream is encoded in MPEG-4, running at a variable bit rate that hovers around 6.5Mbps. The U-verse pipe is built on a 25Mbps profile, which is divvied up by high-end QoS for TV and your internet.)

Next, we go into some of the media sharing stuff, which probably looks familiar to anyone with an Xbox 360 or media extender since U-Verse uses Microsoft's IPTV platform. Music, movies, pictures, streamed to your TV from a standard Windows Vista or Media Center PC on the network—basic, but nice, since this is all just pumping into your set-top box. They've also got TVersity running off their network, which basically will stream anything to any device with a web browser, be it PSP or iPhone. It's running over Wi-Fi and it's actually damn snappy. I'm not really sure how this fits into the IPTV platform, other than their vision of a totally networked home.

All of this is "six to nine months" ahead of the field now. So, you could expect this stuff in the next year, though it's not officially announced yet. It's all about mainstreaming media streaming and sharing—a baby step, but probably necessarily to get, say, your parents ready for what's coming after it. This is when Peter pops on the "ultra-bleeding edge box" though he warns me none of this is actually guaranteed to become a TV reality.

Fire up the box. Welcome to Peter's favorites. Yep, like Sezmi, everyone gets their own personalized TV setup, with recommendations, favorites, etc. You can also log in and control the set-top box from the iPhone, like a sweet multi-touch remote. It's running over Wi-Fi and it's as responsive as any other remote control. But you know, sexier. An app for streaming to the iPhone? Not yet, I'm told, since there are "certain areas of the iPhone" where "Apple is keeping the experience..." "Controlled?" I volunteered.

It's a good transition to the more internet-y stuff they've got going on. Integrated RSS feeds—you can read Giz on your TV and have it not look like crap! Video RSS feeds are where it's at though, like a feed of CNN clips that constantly refreshes. It's like Headline News, without the waiting. Course, it can also pull in YouTube, though I'm more interested in Hulu.

Here's where AT&T benefits from being AT&T here, with your phone jacked into your set-top box. Maybe more "cool" than critical. A message asking for a video share call from a local Atlanta 404 number appears on the screen. Caller ID on the TV. We smack yes, and we're looking through the eyes of an LG Glimmer on our TV. Yeah, it looks like shit on the 60-inch DLP set, but it really works. Next, I call Peter's cell and leave a voice mail. A few seconds later, we're informed by the TV we've got a new voicemail waiting, so we flip over to a list of incoming calls. We can remotely check out the voicemail or add the contact to our address book.

The finale: It's basically Twitter TV. You jump into a chat room with your friends (or invite them) and you can bleat out IMs that are collected on a timeline as you watch Leonidas atomically kick effeminate Persians into bottomless pits. And lest you were worried about text-typing via a crappy remote control, I actually used an iPhone to input the text. Later you can go back and scour the conversation timeline like regular IM, looking for a nugget of insight that might've accidentally slipped out during the orgy of violence (or whatever else you and your friends are simultaneously watching). BTW, the cheesy avatars will be updated to look less like late-'90s Messenger, I'm told.

While these are all, by themselves, just little bits of coolness, taken together, it is a shift from the mostly passive way we watch TV. We actively time and place-shift now, but once we're plopped in front of the screen, input from us stops, despite decades of prediction that TV would become more and more interactive. U-Verse is not wholly revolutionary, but it's a stride toward true TV 2.0, with content from multiple sources, fueled by the internet. TV's got to do something, after all—there's less and less reason to be drawn to that particular idiot box, when there are so many boxes out there for so many different kinds of idiots. Of course, cable's got its own ideas about the future of TV, and soon we'll be looking into that too.

First, let's go over the features that Mediaroom offers now. With a simple set-top-box, you can grab high quality HDTV that's better quality (seeing as Comcast has been compressing their HDTV shows like mad) than what you'd otherwise get on cable. If you've got two set-top-boxes, you can stream shows off of each other so you don't have to record a program twice to be able to watch it in your living room and bedroom. This feature is called DVR Anywhere, and will be available whenever operators roll it out.

You can even watch the same TV broadcast or recorded shows on your Windows PC or Xbox 360, a feature that's been announced since CES by Microsoft, but is up to the actual service provider (AT&T, BT) to roll out. In AT&T's case, it won't be available until the second-half of 2008. Update: Microsoft tells me that the details here were a bit off. The Xbox 360 support was announced at CES and will be rolled out on BT's Vision service in the future. AT&T hasn't announced Xbox 360 support. Viewing shows on a PC is something I saw demonstrated in Microsoft's labs, but I'm clarifying with Microsoft as to what it was.

This leads us to the new feature Microsoft showed off: Applications. Since IPTV is a two-way street, your Mediaroom set-top-boxes are able to pull down information from the net, leading to very interesting interactive programs that people can code up for shows. For example:

• During a boxing match, you can pull up different mics, view fighter stats, and even view/vote in polls.

• Nascar races will let you bring up the cockpit cams of your favorite driver (as long as the driver is being tracked by TNT), or listen to the pit crew shout directions.

• During a primary event, CNN allows you to bring up voting results, bios, and other information about each candidate.

And so on. These apps are coded by the shows' producers, then sold to the provider in order to enhance your viewing experience. You could even code up your own app, tack it onto Lost, and try and sell it.

No service provider currently has applications in place now, but they're lightweight and should be able to be run on set top boxes out there today. It's just a matter of your local provider getting these features from Microsoft and integrating it into their service plans. [MeidaRoom]