Not Impressed with the DirecTV App Store

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My pal Tim has been mucking about in the newish DirecTV widget platform and, based on his video above, isn’t all that impressed. (Which may be partially attributed to DirecTV’s house brand of DVR which doesn’t function as smoothly his former DirecTiVo models. He’s just a little bitter.) While DirecTV’s “App Store” (Flickr, Twitter, weather, etc) seems too slow in his home to be usable, I prefer this on-box Internet app overlay experimentation to the connected television trend –  folks will purchase/upgrade their sets with much less frequency.

4 thoughts on “Not Impressed with the DirecTV App Store”

  1. I had more to say on this topic, that Verizon is leading the way with Internet-connected widgets, I’ve been a fan of the Moxi Ticker (think ESPN2 crawl) for years now, this is the way we’re moving by co-mingling Internet content with traditional television content, etc. But I’m a bit out of sorts this AM and not feeling very motivated to write. So I’ll be catching up on my Autoblog reading instead. :)

  3. I’ve been using/testing this about nine months now, and it hasn’t change a BIT in that period. There are no new apps, and the speed hasn’t gotten any better. It is a neat idea, but personally, I don’t want all this stuff cluttering my view. I MIGHT want a popup hourly or at startup of TEMP, or new messages count, or new emails from a specific person (just the notification though NOT the email) or a traffic overlay in the mornings, something like that.

  4. This is a cool feature but they really have to fix the performance issues. Why is the performance so slow? Is it because of the one way nature of the Satellite?

    Perhaps a transponder is broadcasting a repeating stream of all the data required for every single app, including the interface to get into the app store. So if you go into the app store, the receiver has to sit there and wait until it sees the data it’s looking for. Unless they could talk upstream, but I hear DirecPC really sucks and they FAP you to dialup speeds. Regardless on how narrow their spot beams are, there’s still a huge latency for two way data to travel up and back down again.

    Cable should get on the ball with this next. Most of their advanced HD and HD-DVR set tops have built in DOCSIS 2.0 modems. A two way DOCSIS channel would provide much better bandwidth for this type of use.

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