And where did you get such information ?
AT&T IS focusing on DirecTV, when someone calls in for TV services, they are offered DirecTV first, uVerse is still offered when the subscriber is in a uVerse area, if they want it.
AT&T is still using their uVerse setups for those that don't want to change, don't want a dish, or don't like potential rain/snow outages.
AT&T is going to continue selling their Internet so the uVerse footprint is not going away, however the TV isn't being pushed like it use to be.
As for your complaints about how bad the picture is .... Do you currently have uVerse TV ?
If not, how can you bash that as well without actually having the service .... a friend has it DOESN'T cut it.
Yes, I
actually had uVerse TV. Just a short while ago I had it. I dropped them about three weeks ago. And yes, the TV picture quality was
really that bad.
Let's face facts here. Most video encoding experts say that a properly encoded HDTV feed requires at the very least
8 Mbps using MPEG4 h.264 to maintain decent picture quality;
preferably 9 to 10 Mbps to deliver superb picture quality. And here's AT&T encoding at 5.7 Mbps for their uVerse TV product. Absolutely pathetic. It's no wonder why AT&T uVerse TV picture quality looks like absolute crap. They pretty much have to encode at such a low (and pathetic) rate because of the bandwidth constraints of their copper VDSL lines.
I was watching Marvel's Agents of Shield and that new Gotham show (both of which have dark scenes in them especially Gotham in when they're in the police station) and I was blown away when I saw it for the first time on DirecTV. Why? Because I could, for the first time, see details in the dark backgrounds that I never saw on uVerse TV. I saw various shades of gray and blacks that I never saw before. On uVerse TV all of the background scenes in which there were dark colors were a complete muddy mess. It was like the encoder ran out of bits to represent the background colors that required complex shades of color. And then there's my local news broadcasts in which when the weather report comes on with the radar picture. On uVerse TV you could see major macroblocking when the radar picture moved. And then there's the national ABC News broadcast in which on DirecTV I could see the pinstripe detail of David Muir's suit; never saw that on uVerse TV in which it just shows it as a detail-less gray.
So yes, DirecTV
is in fact superior to uVerse TV! I have compared the two, side by side, and DirecTV wins.
It's no contest!
There's another forum I hang out in over at DSLReports.com where there's a number of uVerse Premise Technicians that hang out. They help out where they can and give advice to people who have line and service issues. A number of them have been talking about the fact that they will be getting DirecTV installation training in the very near future. Some of them have already had said training.
It's been said elsewhere that uVerse TV is losing money for AT&T and that that's another reason why AT&T bought DirecTV, to help bring in more subscribers (and the clout that comes with it) to be able to tell the network providers where to shove their rate increases.
As for the state of the uVerse copper plant, it's horrible. I have heard enough horror stories from people who have tried to get uVerse service (any service, even just Internet service) to be able to write a book on the subject. I'm sure that the Premise Technicians that hang out over at DSLReports.com could expand that book to a trilogy. The issue is that in a lot of places the copper plant is in such complete and total disrepair that uVerse hardly works in those areas. Everything from bad splices to bad grounds to water in the lines to animal activity that's turned the cables to junk. And let's not forget that as you add more uVerse subscribers to an area you introduce more noise to the F2 cable bundle (that's that line on the pole or buried in the ground) so your SNR numbers take a crap. Yes, I know, there's rumors that AT&T will be turning up something called VDSL Vectoring some time in the future that
promises to help increase SNR numbers on marginal lines and where there's lots of uVerse subscribers but like many Premise Technicians have said, I'll believe it when I see it.