YOU'VE got another pay television provider that wants your business. But are AT&T Inc.'s upgraded phone lines a smart way to watch TV?
The behemoth of phone companies is pushing into a new field, offering video programming in parts of 14 Southern California communities, from Simi Valley to Anaheim to Riverside. And that's just for starters.
A mere infant in pay television, AT&T is spending up to $6.5 billion in its initial phase to build a hybrid network of fast fiber-optic and conventional copper wires to deliver its U-verse TV service. It expects to cover 18 million homes in California and 12 other states by the end of next year.
If U-verse is a success, AT&T is expected to offer the program eventually in most of the places it has telephone service.
"It's very revolutionary for AT&T to say, 'We're going to use a phone system to deliver video,' " said analyst James McQuivey at Forrester Research Inc. "They have to make sure it works just as well as cable. Then they have to differentiate it. Because if it works just as well, why switch?"
The answer depends on your desires and your budget.
U-verse customers are telling AT&T that picture quality is generally better than cable and satellite. And they like a few of U-verse's free features, including faster channel changing than digital TV and the ability to record as many as four shows at once on a rent-free digital video recorder.
On the flip side, U-verse can send only one high-definition signal at a time, which means you can't record one HD show while watching another. You can with cable and satellite providers and with the FiOS TV service from Verizon Communications Inc., which runs on an all-fiber network to the home.
What's more, if you want to get Internet access from the same provider, the connections from cable companies and FiOS can be faster than U-verse.
The marketers at AT&T and Verizon have tough jobs: Many of the things that make their services different from cable aren't very easy to get across.
The key distinctions lie largely in the boring details of how the systems are put together. That's one reason the phone companies are trying to get closer to customers by showing off their TV offerings at neighborhood functions and in traveling vans.
The phone giants do have some cool, new features:
* Hate that annoying lag time switching channels on digital TV sets? U-verse has an answer called fast channel change.
