Flying under the radar last week, DIRECTV officially released their Video On Demand, (VOD) service. Titled DIRECTV On Demand, the satellite provider is promising more than 4,000 offerings in both standard and HD initially. Titles will be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
DIRECTV is not charging anything for the on demand service, following the lead of cable TV leaders Comcast and Time Warner. Customers do need the proper receiver, either a DIRECTV Plus HD DVR or a R22 DVR receiver in order to access on demand services. Customers also need a broadband connection in order to download much of the content.
That is the potential sticking point for many DIRECTV customers, as satellite TV is the only option in many rural areas. At the same time, rural areas are usually the last to receive upgrades which can deliver high speed internet services. DIRECTV will also provide pushed on demand content. In this case, programming will be delivered via satellite directly to the customers DVR. DIRECTV said in a press release that generally this content will be restricted to blockbuster movies, probably a good idea as most people won’t want a bunch of stuff that they don’t want sent to their digital video recorders.
To get set up with DIRECTV on Demand, customers must either choose to install the needed equipment themselves, or have a professional installation done. This presents another potential obstacle in getting the more than 17 million DIRECTV customers on-demand capable. Hooking these customers up one at a time will take many years, and will also open the door to customer frustration as many attempt to hook up the service themselves at first.
DIRECTV has been promising their on demand product for some time, and as part of the rollout touted its easy to use customer interface. As part of the program, each programmer that provides on demand content will have its own channel. The example cited in the press release from DIRECTV was the Discovery channel, currently broadcast on channel 276. The Discover Channel on demand will be on channel 1276, so any time a customer wants to see the on demand offerings from a particular network, the can just put a “1” in front of the current channel they are on to investigate what is available.
DIRECTV on demand is also offering additional features such as internet remote scheduling and expanded pay per view offerings as part of the service.
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This is huge for directtv. They will probably cause a lot of customers to switch over from their cable providers. I currently have cable and considering switching to the dish and this is a big incentive for me to switch over. It would have been nice for existing customers if the on-demand service was just a software upgrade and no new equipment needed.