Anyone want to take a stab at guessing how I feel? 
It wouldnt work and probably wont work with the proprietary Panasonic 170Mb/s powerline boxes I own that work great with everything else. Problem with those (and with many powerline and wireless devices in many homes) is fluency of throughput. They all hiccup a little bit (or more) every now and then and a live stream just cant get through that without also hiccing up.
I'm going to hazard a guess that for many people, the 85Mb/s powerline devices they bought from directv over the last year and a half also wont work that great with it, unless they're in a small house or on the same circuit.
I'm also going to hazard a guess that for every 100 customers who purchase this 'option', directv will get 85 phone calls with complaints about it and 80 of them will cancel it. The rest will have tried it on a pre-existing wired network, have run a wire, or have good tolerance for glip-glip-gliping audio and video.
Before I retired, I used to be head of marketing for a really big technology related company. Chances are 90% or better that you're sitting in a room with something my company turned out. So given that I have a certain amount of expertise with both marketing and the technology, the last thing in the world I'd be trying to do is offer this as a for-fee option. I'd use it as a club to beat my competition with, and maintain my pricing advantage, and make sure all my customers knew how many nice features they had added to their service this year at no cost...dlb, mrv, smart search, etc. Good retention move and except for the development costs, free.
Especially considering the iffy nature of many customers actually getting this to work well without making a $200-400 investment in networking infrastructure. Or even knowing or wanting to know how to do all the work, along with the cash out of pocket.
Or maybe i'm just looking at this from the wrong end of the telescope. Maybe directv doesnt want the average customer to buy this. Maybe they just want the high end customers who know they want it, are willing to pay for it, and will deal with the hassles and expense.
All 40-50,000 or so of them. Maybe that'd just about cover the development costs.
I think i'll take the same tack short term that others are taking. I'll pay for it and drop the HD Extra Pack and get a net gain of a buck or two on my bill. Then when my contract expires in 4 months, dump directv and get a pair of hd tivo's and cable. Does everything I want, way less drama.
I also think the principal problem here is that directv's marketing people are pretty well disconnected from the real customers. I know they've done some reach-out stuff to get more first hand input and thats great, but they mostly asked fanboy-oriented customers to participate and anyone who was inclined to disagree or criticize got annoyed with the process and gave up.
If you ask dbstalk to supply you with a list of people who might like to talk to the VP of marketing for Directv, guess what you're going to get...
It wouldnt work and probably wont work with the proprietary Panasonic 170Mb/s powerline boxes I own that work great with everything else. Problem with those (and with many powerline and wireless devices in many homes) is fluency of throughput. They all hiccup a little bit (or more) every now and then and a live stream just cant get through that without also hiccing up.
I'm going to hazard a guess that for many people, the 85Mb/s powerline devices they bought from directv over the last year and a half also wont work that great with it, unless they're in a small house or on the same circuit.
I'm also going to hazard a guess that for every 100 customers who purchase this 'option', directv will get 85 phone calls with complaints about it and 80 of them will cancel it. The rest will have tried it on a pre-existing wired network, have run a wire, or have good tolerance for glip-glip-gliping audio and video.
Before I retired, I used to be head of marketing for a really big technology related company. Chances are 90% or better that you're sitting in a room with something my company turned out. So given that I have a certain amount of expertise with both marketing and the technology, the last thing in the world I'd be trying to do is offer this as a for-fee option. I'd use it as a club to beat my competition with, and maintain my pricing advantage, and make sure all my customers knew how many nice features they had added to their service this year at no cost...dlb, mrv, smart search, etc. Good retention move and except for the development costs, free.
Especially considering the iffy nature of many customers actually getting this to work well without making a $200-400 investment in networking infrastructure. Or even knowing or wanting to know how to do all the work, along with the cash out of pocket.
Or maybe i'm just looking at this from the wrong end of the telescope. Maybe directv doesnt want the average customer to buy this. Maybe they just want the high end customers who know they want it, are willing to pay for it, and will deal with the hassles and expense.
All 40-50,000 or so of them. Maybe that'd just about cover the development costs.
I think i'll take the same tack short term that others are taking. I'll pay for it and drop the HD Extra Pack and get a net gain of a buck or two on my bill. Then when my contract expires in 4 months, dump directv and get a pair of hd tivo's and cable. Does everything I want, way less drama.
I also think the principal problem here is that directv's marketing people are pretty well disconnected from the real customers. I know they've done some reach-out stuff to get more first hand input and thats great, but they mostly asked fanboy-oriented customers to participate and anyone who was inclined to disagree or criticize got annoyed with the process and gave up.
If you ask dbstalk to supply you with a list of people who might like to talk to the VP of marketing for Directv, guess what you're going to get...
