Hello fellow couch potatoes! I’m not sure if this is actually news or just something that I happened to stumble upon, but tonight while I was surfing on my DirecTV DVR, I inadvertently pressed the Right arrow key on my remote while watching a live show. When I did, a popup appeared on the Right side of the screen telling me it was loading the app store. I thought “Hmmmm, what is this?”
After what seemed like 30 seconds or 5 months later, a row of apps or widgets appeared down the Right side of the screen.
By default, there was a weather app, two sports related apps, a what’s hot app and a horoscope app.
Clicking the cursor on an app opened another popup window on the screen. Above you see the weather app (sorry, my pictures are not very good…). An options button below the open app allowed me to set the city or zip code, which I did.
If you go into the app store, you can list different apps that you can add to the sidebar. The only additional one that I’ve loaded so far is a Flickr app.
The app store is extremely slow and 8 times out of 10, gives me a “We’re experiencing Technical Difficulties, Try Again Later…” message when I try to look at different options. That’s why I’m thinking this is a new feature that must have just rolled out.
Has anyone else discovered this new feature on their DirecTV DVRs, or am I just late to the party? It has the potential to be kinda neat… but only if they fix the speed issue. As is, it’s pretty painful to play with.
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That’s awesome! I am looking into getting satellite again, especially with their end of the year promo! If I do, I’ll have to check out these options.
I’ll have to try that out, Julie. I sure haven’t seen it & haven’t heard of it yet.
It sounds pretty cool, but how successful it will be will depend entirely on how open DirecTV is. I bet it will cost companies money to get their apps on the system and that will make it more limited than what Apple is doing on their iPhone platform. Cable, Satellite and now Telcos are notorious for trying to maintain 100% control over their systems. If this is DirecTV actually opening things up then it’s rad, but if it’s just their own content, then it’s nothing more than marketing.
If you’re running 802.11N you should be OK. Anything slower and you’re probably not going to like it. I also got the recommended wifi interface and it works great and is WICKED fast. That’s what allows you to get on demand movies and series. Their UI needs a little work. It could be slicker, but having said that, DirecTV’s compression scheme kicks cable’s ass. TV NEVER LOOKED BETTER. If they got AMC HD it would be perfect. Madmen in SD isn’t the greatest.
We saw this a couple months back. Kind of wonky to use and we didn’t go back. Maybe they were still working the bugs out I don’t know. Love our Directv otherwise though.