AT&T today said it had started rolling out a new enhancement to its U-verse IPTV service that that lets customers watch up to four HD shows at one time and also gives most U-verse TV customers the ability to record three HD shows and one SD show at the same time with their Total Home DVR--a feature not offered by other TV providers. The provider said the product is rolling out on a market-by-market basis to new and existing customers over the next several months.
The upgrade is due to DSL upgrades and refined MPEG-4 compression, John Stankey, CEO of the AT&T Operations division, told an audience at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Media, Communications & Entertainment investor conference Thursday. When U-verse launched in 2006, it was only capable of four SD streams into a home, he said. Today, customers can watch two consurrent HD streams at home.
In its latest earnings call, AT&T said U-verse had added 209,000 subscribers in Q2, an increase of 60 percent over the like quarter a year earlier, taking the total to some 2.5 million.
U-verse continues to drive a transformation in AT&T's consumer business, reflected by the fact that consumer IP revenues now represent 40.4 percent of AT&T's consumer wireline revenues, up from 30.6 percent in the year-earlier quarter. In the second quarter, AT&T U-verse revenues exceeded $1 billion for the first time, more than twice the U-verse revenues in the second quarter of 2009.
For more:
- see this Multichannel News item
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