AT&T confirmed what analysts have been repeating since the launch of the service provider's Internet TV service Homezone: Homezone offers IPTV (-like) service to those consumers who don't want to wait for fiber optic to appear in their neighborhood. It's IPTV for the impatient. Homezone requires subscribers to sign up with a bundle of phone, Internet and satellite TV services from Yahoo and Dish Network's EchoStar Communications.
By the end of 2006 Homezone should be available across AT&T's 13-state service region. "U-verse is definitely the end game" for AT&T's IPTV push, said Joe Laszlo of JupiterKagan Research. U-verse, with its 200+ channels, VOD and internal DVR, should drop sometime around 2008--and by the end of that year AT&T hopes to service 19 million homes with U-verse and spend $4.6 billion on the initiative.
For more on AT&T's Homezone:
- read this article from InternetNews