October 12, 2010, 8:04 AM — Amid all the Windows Phone 7 excitement yesterday, AT&T dropped some U-verse information that may have been lost in the shuffle.
First, AT&T U-verse customers will be able to access content from their Windows Phone 7 handsets, as well as managing their DVR remotely. Phone 7 users who are not U-verse customers can still get the U-verse Mobile experience for a monthly fee of somewhere between $8-$10 (different sources have reported different figures). Oddly AT&T's press release uses the phrase "download and watch several times and I'm not sure how literally to take that. Will we really need to free up space on our phone to download the content in order to view it? Hopefully this is just a marketing department fumble and in practice the content will just stream to Windows Phone 7 devices.
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More interesting to me was confirmation that U-verse is coming to Xbox 360 gaming systems. This is going to allow you to watch live TV via the Xbox. It sounds like U-verse for Xbox is going to replace your AT&T set-top box. Not only will you be able to watch TV, but you'll have DVR functionality, access to the program guide, and basically all the features you have via AT&T's hardware. Presumably AT&T will give you some kind of hardware attachment for your Xbox (you don't want to devote your Xbox's hard drive space to DVR duty, right?) and unfortunately it isn't free. New users pay $99 for the Xbox functionality and existing users will pay a $55 installation fee. Depending on whether there's a monthly fee after that, these costs are either very reasonable or another example of a cable provider putting the screws to its customers. AT&T does say you'll be replacing a cable box and the rental fee associated with it, so the implication, at least, is that you're paying a one time fee which will pay for itself in saved equipment rental costs pretty quickly.
So what will the experience will be like? It sounds like the Xbox version of Google TV in a way. You can watch live TV while chatting with Xbox friends or dealing with friend requests. You can switch back and forth between game and TV seamlessly. At the risk of stating the obvious it combines your current TV viewing experience with your current Xbox gaming experience.
I'm too old to be the intended audience (to me, the idea of a friend's request to play a game popping up in the closing moments of a good TV show or movie sounds more annoying than cool) but for the always connected, always chatting generation U-verse on Xbox could turn out to be a really awesome service.
U-verse TV on Xbox 360 launches this Friday, October 15th.
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