yes it will. most families don't have more than 2 streams going at once. Netflix has lost tons of money of this and AT&T wants to wait to figure out the best way too handle it. If the demand for this way higher than AT&T would accommodate. Well no **** if someone leaves AT&T then AT&T loses. AT&T is encouraging people their own customers to cut the cord with them especially with unlimited data plans if you have their streaming product. As really the only company that is a wireless and wireline data provider, cord cutting is very good for them as cord cutting requires tons of data (Netflix i think is 40% of all data usage in the US).
I disagree. The demand IS higher. That's why Netflix allows customers to pay for additional streams, and why Sling is now moving towards doing the same. Multiple streams isn't something that may be needed on a daily basis, but when you need it... You need it. And there's nothing more frustrating then not being able to consume content in your own home EXACTLY the way that you want to, especially when there's an arbitrary barrier created by a service provider. If they're worried about people sharing accounts, then that's what IP geolocation is for. You said: "At&t greatly benefits from cord cutting as they are an Internet provider too." I responded to that with: "People pay for internet regardless of whether or not they pay for TV. So every time a DIRECTV or Uverse customer cuts the cord, ATT loses." I think you missed the point. People who have Internet service through AT&T and have a cable subscription likely are receiving that subscription via DIRECTV or Uverse. So that means they are paying for cable AND Internet. If one of these families cuts the cord (cable), and keeps their Internet, AT&T still loses because they just lost a cable subscriber. So they are not benefiting because they're an ISP too. And that's even if the customer cut the cord in favor of DIRECTV Now. Think about all the money lost in arbitrary HD Programming fees, DVR Service fees, equipment lease fees, equipment protection fees, entire package upgrades just to get one or two desired channels, etc. They're making a killing off of their TV services. They are in no way going to easily allow DIRECTV Now to siphon off their current higher paying TV subscribers. If anything, DIRECTV Now is intended to retrieve some of those customers that they know were never going to come back to their traditional cable TV service. And setting themselves up for the future so that they don't go the way of Blockbuster and Kodak. But as for right now... They absolutely ARE NOT encouraging people to cut the cord.
People do this to cheat those systems. Both those companies have been trying desperately to solve this problem. THey are if their data usage goes up which it will if they are cord cutting and also if they offer the best cord cutting product. equipment protection fees don't exist for U-Verse or DirecTV. Package upgrades exist in internet world too (wireless and wireline). imagine all the money the upgrades that will happen when people start cord cutting.... They absolutely are. They are better positioned than any company to gain from it. Comcast and Spectrum can't compete in that world. Google and Apple maybe
Equipment protection does exist for DIRECTV. I pay it every month. We'll just have to agree to disagree.
Man I hate being not most families. First we will be going over the 1tb internet cap by comcast and now my familynthat multistreams and multigames isnt part of the most families category. Unique! I call bs tho, my 3 year old will have on repeat power rangers, the other two will take turns between gaming and streaming.........usually utube. Wife will be legit on the box with my ipad streaming something. Either the rockets or crunchyroll
Anyone heard anything about AT&T trying to phase out U-Verse? I had a guy with an AT&T shirt stop by my house and try to switch me to DirecTV saying U-Verse was on the way out. I called AT&T and asked if this was true. The lady wouldn't give me a direct answer. She just kept asking where I lived before she would respond. When I responded with that information she said No. I asked again if it was in AT&T plans to eliminate U-Verse and she wouldn't answer.
The biggest U.S. pay TV provider has stopped building U-verse set-top boxes and is nudging prospective customers toward its satellite unit, which has lower hardware and programming costs.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/25/at-t-is-spying-on-americans-for-profit.html AT&T Is Spying on Americans for Profit, New Documents Reveal Spoiler On Nov. 11, 2013, Victorville, California, sheriff’s deputies and a coroner responded to a motorcyclist’s report of human remains outside of town. They identified the partially bleached skull of a child, and later discovered the remains of the McStay family who had been missing for the past three years. Joseph, 40, his wife Summer, 43, Gianni, 4, and Joseph Jr., 3, had been bludgeoned to death and buried in shallow graves in the desert. Investigators long suspected Charles Merritt in the family’s disappearance, interviewing him days after they went missing. Merritt was McStay’s business partner and the last person known to see him alive. Merritt had also borrowed $30,000 from McStay to cover a gambling debt, a mutual business partner told police. None of it was enough to make an arrest. Even after the gravesite was discovered and McStay’s DNA was found inside Merritt’s vehicle, police were far from pinning the quadruple homicide on him. Until they turned to Project Hemisphere. Hemisphere is a secretive program run by AT&T that searches trillions of call records and analyzes cellular data to determine where a target is located, with whom he speaks, and potentially why. “Merritt was in a position to access the cellular telephone tower northeast of the McStay family gravesite on February 6th, 2010, two days after the family disappeared,” an affidavit for his girlfriend’s call records reports Hemisphere finding (PDF). Merritt was arrested almost a year to the date after the McStay family’s remains were discovered, and is awaiting trial for the murders. In 2013, Hemisphere was revealed by The New York Timesand described only within a Powerpoint presentation made by the Drug Enforcement Administration. The Timesdescribed it as a “partnership” between AT&T and the U.S. government; the Justice Department said it was an essential, and prudently deployed, counter-narcotics tool. However, AT&T’s own documentation—reported here by The Daily Beast for the first time—shows Hemisphere was used far beyond the war on drugs to include everything from investigations of homicide to Medicaid fraud. Hemisphere isn’t a “partnership” but rather a product AT&T developed, marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to taxpayers. No warrant is required to make use of the company’s massive trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it becomes public. These new revelations come as the company seeks to acquire Time Warner in the face of vocal opposition saying the deal would be bad for consumers. Donald Trump told supporters over the weekend he would kill the acquisition if he’s elected president; Hillary Clinton has urged regulators to scrutinize the deal. While telecommunications companies are legally obligated to hand over records, AT&T appears to have gone much further to make the enterprise profitable, according to ACLU technology policy analyst Christopher Soghoian. “Companies have to give this data to law enforcement upon request, if they have it. AT&T doesn’t have to data-mine its database to help police come up with new numbers to investigate,” Soghoian said. AT&T has a unique power to extract information from its metadata because it retains so much of it. The company owns more than three-quarters of U.S. landline switches, and the second largest share of the nation’s wireless infrastructure and cellphone towers, behind Verizon. AT&T retains its cell tower data going back to July 2008, longer than other providers. Verizon holds records for a year and Sprint for 18 months, according to a 2011 retention schedule obtained by The Daily Beast. The disclosure of Hemisphere was not the first time AT&T has been caught working with law enforcement above and beyond what the law requires. Special cooperation with the government to conduct surveillance dates back to at least 2003, when AT&T ordered technician Mark Klein to help the National Security Agency install a bug directly into its main San Francisco internet exchange point, Room 641A. The company invented a programming language to mine its own records for surveillance, and in 2007 came under fire for handing these mined records over to the FBI. That same year Hemisphere was born. By 2013, it was deployed to three DEA High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) Investigative Support Centers, according to the Times. Today, Hemisphere is used in at least 28 of these intelligence centers across the country, documents show. The centers are staffed by federal agents as well as local law enforcement; one center is the Los Angeles Regional Criminal Information Clearinghouse, where Merritt’s number was sent for analysis. Analysis is done by AT&T employees on behalf of law enforcement clients through these intelligence centers, but performed at another location in the area. At no point does law enforcement directly access AT&T’s data.
part 2 since I guess I can't post messages longer than 10000 characters Spoiler A statement of work from 2014 shows how hush-hush AT&T wants to keep Hemisphere. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3174546-Snapshot-59076.html#document/p4 “The Government agency agrees not to use the data as evidence in any judicial or administrative proceedings unless there is no other available and admissible probative evidence,” it says. But those charged with a crime are entitled to know the evidence against them come trial. Adam Schwartz, staff attorney for activist group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that means AT&T may leave investigators no choice but to construct a false investigative narrative to hide how they use Hemisphere if they plan to prosecute anyone. Once AT&T provides a lead through Hemisphere, then investigators use routine police work, like getting a court order for a wiretap or following a suspect around, to provide the same evidence for the purpose of prosecution. This is known as “parallel construction.” “This document here is striking,” Schwartz told The Daily Beast. “I’ve seen documents produced by the government regarding Hemisphere, but this is the first time I’ve seen an AT&T document which requires parallel construction in a service to government. It’s very troubling and not the way law enforcement should work in this country.” The federal government reimburses municipalities for the expense of Hemisphere through the same grant program that is blamed for police militarization by paying for military gear like Bearcat vehicles. “At a minimum there is a very serious question whether they should be doing it without a warrant. A benefit to the parallel construction is they never have to face that crucible. Then the judge, the defendant, the general public, the media, and elected officials never know that AT&T and police across America funded by the White House are using the world’s largest metadata database to surveil people,” Schwartz said. The EFF, American Civil Liberties Union, and Electronic Privacy Information Center have all expressed concern that surveillance using Hemisphere is unconstitutionally invasive, and have sought more information on the program, with little success. The EFF is currently awaiting a judge’s ruling on its Freedom of Information Act suit against the Department of Justice for Hemisphere documentation. AT&T spokesperson Fletcher Cook told The Daily Beast via an email that there is “no special database,” and that the only additional service AT&T provides for Atlanta’s intelligence center is dedicated personnel to speed up requests. “Like other communications companies, if a government agency seeks customer call records through a subpoena, court order or other mandatory legal process, we are required by law to provide this non-content information, such as the phone numbers and the date and time of calls,” AT&T’s statement said. Soghoian said AT&T is being misleading. “They say they only cooperate with law enforcement as required, and frankly, that’s offensive when they are mining the data of millions of innocent people, and really built a business and services around the needs of law enforcement,” he said. Sheriff and police departments pay from $100,000 to upward of $1 million a year or more for Hemisphere access. Harris County, Texas, home to Houston, made its inaugural payment to AT&T of $77,924 in 2007, according to a contract reviewed by The Daily Beast. Four years later, the county’s Hemisphere bill had increased more than tenfold to $940,000. “Did you see that movie Field of Dreams?” Soghoian asked. “It’s like that line, ‘if you build it, they will come.’ Once a company creates a huge surveillance apparatus like this and provides it to law enforcement, they then have to provide it whenever the government asks. They’ve developed this massive program and of course they’re going to sell it to as many people as possible.” AT&T documents state law enforcement doesn’t need a search warrant to use Hemisphere, just an administrative subpoena, which does not require probable cause. The DEA was granted administrative subpoena power in 1970. The Supreme Court ruled in 1979’s Smith v. Maryland that “non-content” metadata such as phone records were like an address written on an envelope, and phone customers had no reasonable expectation that it would be kept private. AT&T stores details for every call, text message, Skype chat, or other communication that has passed through its infrastructure, retaining many records dating back to 1987, according to the Times 2013 Hemisphere report. The scope and length of the collection has accumulated trillions of recordsand is believed to be larger than any phone record database collected by the NSA under the Patriot Act, the Times reported. The database allows its analysts to detect hidden patterns and connections between call detail records, and make highly accurate inferences about the associations and movements of the people Hemisphere is used to surveil. Its database is particularly useful for tracking a subscriber between multiple discarded phone numbers, as when drug dealers use successive prepaid “burner” phones to evade conventional surveillance. Some Hemisphere operations have regionally appropriate nicknames: Atlanta’s is “Peach,” while Hawaii’s has been called “Sunshine.” West Allis, Wisconsin, city council minutes do not name the contract at all, referring to it only as “services needed for an investigative tool used by each of the HIDTA’s Investigative Support Centers from AT&T Government Solutions.” In 2014 Cameron County, Texas, Judge Carlos Casco ordered a line item in the commission minutes changed from “Hemisphere Program” to “database analysis services.” Casco is now the secretary of State of Texas. The Florida attorney general’s Medicaid Fraud Unit received “Hemisphere Project” training in 2013, according to a report on the unit’s data-mining activities. Florida is one of eight states that is allowed to spend federal money on anti-fraud data mining initiatives. Florida Medicaid fraud investigators use such technology to look for suspicious connections between call detail records such as “a provider and a beneficiary with the same phone number or address.” A group of shareholders represented by Arjuna Capital are concerned about the effect of negative press on stock value, and filed a proposal in December 2015 to require the company to issue a statement “clarifying the Company’s policies regarding providing information to law enforcement and intelligence agencies, domestically and internationally, above and beyond what is legally required by court order or other legally mandated process.” AT&T contested the proposal and the matter is now before the Securities and Exchange Commission.
DirecTv is superior to Uverse in many many ways. Uverse is a crap product with some of the worst "HD" in the nation. The bitrate they stream HD channels at is the lowest in the country, and worse than a Netflix 720P stream. I will say that their implementation of wireless set top boxes has worked out pretty good though, and for some people it works great and is reliable.
