Top wired telecom provider AT&T is clearly doing something right with U-verse TV, its cable-like service delivering more than 100 high-definition television channels over internet pipes to what are now more than 1.8m living rooms.
On Thursday, AT&T Chief Technology Officer John Donovan and others came to San Francisco to show off what may be coming improvements to U-verse, among other things, from the research labs that claim 8 Nobel Prizes.
There was software that would make the television part of the service work better, including an app that turns an iPhone into a voice-driven remote control that cuts through the morass of programming guides, e.g. “New episodes of Project Runway on Thursday night.”
And there are recent improvements that make the service work a little bit more like a handy piece of TV-PC home-networking. You can find photos and music on your computer and display them on the television screen, and there’s an interface to get the Pandora internet music service.
But I was still struck by two conservative approaches that were also on display in the background. The first is that AT&T is not interested in any kind of app store. Just like the phones it offered before Apple came along, AT&T’s vision of TV on the internet, which relies on Microsoft software, does not include functions that Ma Bell doesn’t design or at least oversee very closely.
“To date, people expect a very polished and cohesive entertainment experience,” said Peter Hill, vice president of converged services at AT&T Labs Research.
The second is that AT&T doesn’t see why people would actually want to surf the internet from their couch. To be fair, no one has proved them wrong so far, and many have tried.
But setting up a visual, onscreen keyboard for seeking TV shows–or, in theory, websites–and then not including a slash key for a Web address?
That seems to fall somewhere between short-sighted and cruel.
