DirecTV Now Launches Cloud DVR With 20 Hours of Storage at No Extra Monthly Cost

[WestonHarvey1]

No DVR. Commercials. Spotty service. Channels come and go.

DirecTV NOW has no commercials?!

 

[Sevendaymelee]

No DVR. Commercials. Spotty service. Channels come and go.

DVR can be done. I have no spotty service because I purchased a great outdoor antenna and my channels do not come and go. It's free, forever.

Obviously, if people have the money to blow and want to blow it, fine. But I don't see the point for myself when I can get nearly 50, crystal clear channels for zero dollars a month. If I absolutely HAVE to have something from like, say HBO? I just buy that series on iTunes or another digital vender.

 

[deeddawg]

No DVR. Commercials. Spotty service. Channels come and go.

DVR is easily addressed with a Tivo device, as various models support OTA. Plus a Tivo DVR works a *heck* of a lot better than DTVN's DVR at this time.

Commercials? DTVN has lots of commercials, though with an OTA Tivo you can easily skip commercials.

Service quality and channel clarity depends on location. I suppose if you live in the middle of a major urban area you have @Sevendaymelee's channel count; though even here in the Atlanta suburbs I get far fewer clear channels over the air.

Also, @Sevendaymelee neglects to mention that a large portion of the OTA channels are home-shopping channels or other crap. Nor does he mention you (typically) don't get any of the "cable" channels you might wish to watch.
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There are times when it goes down, just like any other system. [...] I will deal with an outage here and there. Honestly, it rarely happens to me, maybe some other users can chime in about how reliable it is for them.

Back in January/February I had more issues that I've had in the past couple months, though to be honest I also got on the beta program so I expected more issue.s

As for the service dropping, that has happened a couple times to me. Checking online as @SRLMJ23 suggests is a good way to see if it's "you" or the service. I've also had Comcast drop too, even for a whole evening, so let's not try to compare to a non-existent "perfect service".

My biggest gripe is that the on-demand stuff seems to be pretty inconsistent. Some things have full back-libraries (HBO is good for this), and some things just have a couple week's on-demand back library. Some let you skip forward while watching, some do not. Some are also fraught with errors; I tried to catch up on The Orville and gave up since I'd get halfway through an episode and the service took a dump, lost my spot, and wouldn't let me fast-forward to where I'd left off. (show just wasn't interesting enough to fight the crappy on-demand). In contrast, the $5/mo HBO package was great for being able to watch the entire Game of Thrones series with no memorable issues/problems.

The huge advantage for me with this service is we have a vacation place we go to pretty regularly, and so I'm paying for *one* streaming-TV subscription instead of two cable-TV packages.

I'm sticking with DTVN for now, though may try one of the competitors in time.

 

[SRLMJ23]

DVR is easily addressed with a Tivo device, as various models support OTA. Plus a Tivo DVR works a *heck* of a lot better than DTVN's DVR at this time.

Commercials? DTVN has lots of commercials, though with an OTA Tivo you can easily skip commercials.

Service quality and channel clarity depends on location. I suppose if you live in the middle of a major urban area you have @Sevendaymelee's channel count; though even here in the Atlanta suburbs I get far fewer clear channels over the air.

Also, @Sevendaymelee neglects to mention that a large portion of the OTA channels are home-shopping channels or other crap. Nor does he mention you (typically) don't get any of the "cable" channels you might wish to watch.
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Back in January/February I had more issues that I've had in the past couple months, though to be honest I also got on the beta program so I expected more issue.s

As for the service dropping, that has happened a couple times to me. Checking online as @SRLMJ23 suggests is a good way to see if it's "you" or the service. I've also had Comcast drop too, even for a whole evening, so let's not try to compare to a non-existent "perfect service".

My biggest gripe is that the on-demand stuff seems to be pretty inconsistent. Some things have full back-libraries (HBO is good for this), and some things just have a couple week's on-demand back library. Some let you skip forward while watching, some do not. Some are also fraught with errors; I tried to catch up on The Orville and gave up since I'd get halfway through an episode and the service took a dump, lost my spot, and wouldn't let me fast-forward to where I'd left off. (show just wasn't interesting enough to fight the crappy on-demand). In contrast, the $5/mo HBO package was great for being able to watch the entire Game of Thrones series with no memorable issues/problems.

The huge advantage for me with this service is we have a vacation place we go to pretty regularly, and so I'm paying for *one* streaming-TV subscription instead of two cable-TV packages.

I'm sticking with DTVN for now, though may try one of the competitors in time.

I was in the beta program as well, but actually experienced way less issues than I thought I would.

I agree with you about their on-demand content, that is why I use the actual channel apps anytime they support DTVN.

Having HBO, I get the HBOGO App, which is amazing! Tons of content, fast, no issues with skipping through or losing your spot if you turn a show or movie off half-way through it. Showtime is another great app, same with Fox Sports, ESPN...there is quite a few of them. Use them if you do not already, way better experience.

 

[TheIntruder]

Anyone else seeing this behavior?

The DTVN app was updated to 2.14 on Aug 1st, which appeared in both my iTunes and iPad updates list.

My AppleTV(4) has 2.13 installed and shows no update. Going to the ATV app store displays 2.13 as the current version.

I've never noticed a disparity between iOS device and ATV versions before, for any app, so I'm trying to figure out if something is awry.

Also hoping that a newer version will fix the excessive "stickiness" with the guide screens. They improved the mode/state memory, but now it's not polling and updating enough.

Let's say the guide is invoked at 8:57, so it still displays the very last bit of a program that ends at 9:00.

The problem is, invoke the guide again at 9:02, and it hasn't advanced, but still displays the now ended program, forcing an extra, manual step to select the currently playing 9:00 program, instead of being able to simply click to tune to that channel (doing so brings up a info screen for the ended program) as before.

This also affects the Watch Now previews, and I see it as a regression.

But one step forward, two steps back seems to be their MO.