ATT TV - a little review

That’s probably a fair guess. But it can be sideloaded now.

 

How would we deduce that? Prime isn’t a Google product at all. Google literally has no say in this.

Now a little shift. I had said that FireTV is better than AppleTV in some previous posts. But twiddling with ATV4K the last couple of days points me a little differently.

With a good remote, and with all apps EXCEPT ATT TV’s, it is fine and works well. But it sucks really bad when you try to use the ATT TV app and want to just skip a bit. That just sucks!

So if/when I cancel ATT TV I may just go back to Apple.

 

Well, yeah, there’s that!

While the actual doing of sideloading is actually pretty simple and works well, for a casual user the instructions I used would seem daunting.

 

So further playing around with ATV4K & ATT TV app.

Skipping forward or back is problematic and here’s a couple observations.

With ATV remote you can tap the trackpad and then scroll right/left and it will show what time you are at to select that point. Actually pretty easy once you’ve done it a couple times. But other than the time indication there is no indication of what’s showing at that time.

IOW, no thumbnail or any indication on screen video.

Also, this is easier to do with the ipad/iphone TV remote than it is with the physical remote IMO.

With my Harmony Elite you can skip and you get an indication of what’s going on, but instead of a thumbnail it twiddles the whole screen. Very jerky and irritating, but what’s worse is if you try to FF and try for faster speed, then it loses track, throws up an error and often crashes the app.

On the Harmony Elite there is a trackpad screen but it doesn’t quite work the same as it does on the ATV’s physical remote or the iOS Remote app.

IMO, the ATV isn’t a great experience with the ATT TV app. Other live streaming apps work much better with the ATV and if ATT would use thumbnails for some trickplay it wouldn’t be such a PITA to deal with.

 

Considering that their advertised price is a bit bogus to begin with, this makes it one of the most expensive streamers out there.

If you want to be able to skip ads in DVR’d shows you have to get the enhanced DVR. And if you want no ads for the VOD portions of Hulu then you have to pay for that too. All in all about $85/month.

 

Most streaming apps are available for the ATT Osprey box, the notable ones missing are:

Amazon Prime - while the app works fine on it, you have to sideload it. ATT may not be all that interested in getting Prime and there has been no indication of it ever coming in a few forums that have discussed it.

Hulu - Like Prime, ATT is not showing much interest in it. And since the latest version that can be sideloaded and actually work is v2.1.3 which is pre-Hulu+Live support as there is some technical reason the newer versions won’t work, this is another one that isn’t getting much discussion or speculation about.

Apple’s TV+ app - Since Apple decided not to make an android port of this it probably won’t show up either. Apple could have included Chromecast support in the app but that’s just not the Apple way! Roku recently got AirPlay 2 support but I doubt that many other boxes will.

IMO, ATT has to be given credit for designing the Osprey even though it is a bit of a slug, it is really handy to use with its service and seems to get along pretty well with other apps, and just like every other streaming box out there, what it can and can’t do with other apps varies quite a bit. So far though, the Osprey of today is the same as the first box was with little more than bug fixes along the way. The only nod to the Beta testers was a new and much better remote.

 

Yeah, after I posted I remembered that it was on some few AndroidTV platforms though notably not the boxes. Technically that should mean it could be on more than it is.

It isn’t available on my X900E.