Goodbye DirecTV, welcome U-verse

After 5 years with DirecTV, with 3 years of HD service, we finally decided to jump ship and got ourselves U-versed.

Sometimes it seems that being an early adopter is just not the right decision; in 2005 I paid some $800 for an HD Tivo box, which back that time was state of the art. As some of you might remember the early boxes were only capable of decoding MPEG-2 while you needed a new box for MPEG-4 decoding, necessary to view the local stations in HD (without an off air antenna).


So my $800 box plus the $10/month HD service fee got me <10 HD stations and after only 3 years the hard disk crashed, not even allowing live TV to be watched...

Time to say Goodbye to DirecTV and Tivo





and say Welcome to AT&T U-Verse.

The installation process was very friendly and customized as my technician pulled a cat5 connection to a bonus room where the wireless signal only got one bar on my laptops.

The Wireless Router from 2-Wire is quite a bit larger than my previous Netgear device for DSL only, but it's still small enough to hide under a shelf.



The Set Top Box from Motorola is quite a bit smaller than the Tivo box and is now too small underneath the Bose system:



Our Philips flat panel HD TV has some challenges displaying the SD content centered in the middle and seems a little offset to the right, while HD content seems centered alright.
I would also subjectively say that the U-Verse SD and HD picture quality is inferior to the quality of DirecTV. Quite some pixelation even in slow moving pictures and static text at the bottom of the picture.

So far, I would give it a 5 out of 5 for customer installation service but only a 2 out of 5 for the picture quality.

(quote technician: most customers get used to the picture quality after a while)

Still have some 3 weeks to decide if I want to stick or pull the plug...