Hasta La Gadget!

Touting it as the “most advanced and intuitive HD DVR” available, DIRECTV has announced their latest HD DVR: the DIRECTV Genie. This new DVR brings to the table a whole roster of features you’d be hard-pressed to find elsewhere, including the ability to record up to 5 high-definition videos at once. According to DIRECTV, this flagship DVR is the by-product of integrating as many of the most requested features as possible.

Features include an opt-in recommendation system, which will recommend shows based on the subscriber’s preferences. A single recorded show can be watched on up to four televisions at the same time. Shows can be recorded and deleted from every room with service. With the Genie, the single receiver will operate for the entire home, so that an individual DVR is not needed for every room in which service is wanted.

Recordings can be scheduled up to two weeks in advance, while up to 5 weeks of past shows can be viewed at any time. Genie utilized DIRECTV’s TV Apps to provide access to Pandora, Facebook, Twitter, and ScoreGuide, in addition to the usual array of weathers/news/sports. Genie has 1TB of storage space, which can store about 200 hours of high-definition content, or 800 hours of standard-definition content.

Qualified DIRECTV customers can get a free upgrade to the Genie, and up to four different room connections. New customers who subscribe to certain packages that include the Genie are being offered perks, such as the 2012 NFL Sunday Ticket and free premium channels for three months. The Genie DVR is available beginning today.

DIRECTV announces DIRECTV Genie HD DVR is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
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For starters, I’ll go on record to say that I’m a big DirecTV fan. Having tried Comcast’s abysmal cable box UI and DVR, and knowing the fact that Dish doesn’t have AMC anymore is enough to keep me a loyal subscriber for many years. That said, I was pretty excited to hear about today’s reveal of DirecTV’s newly upgraded HD DVR, the Genie.

The new DVR continues to best others on the market, this time adding a massive 1TB hard drive, capable of storing up to 200 hours of HD programming – or 800 hours of SD (but who watches SD anymore?) The Genie HD DVR also has 5 tuners built in, allowing you to record up to 6 shows at once, including a simultaneous VOD download.

A single Genie receiver will provide whole-home DVR service to up to 8 televisions around your house. You can even watch the same program on up to 4 sets at the same time, and each location gets its own full DVR controls, including record and delete abilities. And if you have a TV that supports RVU (currently Samsung’s 2011 6000, 6400 and 6420 series sets), you won’t even need a separate box to control the Genie.

It also supports picture-in-picture – a feature I’ve sorely missed from older television sets, so you can watch two programs simultaneously on one set.  DirecTV is also touting “Genie recommendations” which are supposed to suggest shows that match your preferences, but I’m not sure how different this is from the recommendation feature already available on current DTV receivers.

I’m definitely interested in upgrading my 5-year-old HD receiver, so I’m happy to hear about today’s announcement – though there’s no official word yet on upgrades for existing subscribers. Though the idea of losing the 50 or so hours of programs I’ve still got to watch on my current DVR is a little hard to stomach. Perhaps, someday they’ll offer an upgrade path that lets you transfer your existing programs to a new DVR.

You can find out more about the DirecTV Genie here.

DirecTV paired its HD interface with the five tuner, RVU ready HR34 Home Media Center DVR back in March, so what will it do next to take advantage of the multiroom boxes with five tuners and massive hard drives? The answer is Genie, a new feature / rebranding that should be very familiar to TiVo users, since its aim is to find other shows you might be interested in and store them on the DVR without being prompted. The folks at Solid Signal and DBSTalk have had an early preview of the fall software update that will enable it, and have both posted hands-on impressions.

Once the user enables the feature, after a few hours it begins episodes of shows similar to the ones they already watch and recording them automatically. The feature uses hard drive space that’s already reserved for DirecTV’s video on-demand (so user accessible recording space is not impacted) and works in selections available from VOD. Watching a program at your leisure VOD-style, setting up a series recording for a new favorite or blasting it from your drive is just a click of the remote away on the DVR or one of its multiroom extenders. Helping viewers discover new content is a field suddenly filled with competition, from the social networking based to Dish Network’s Hopper that records everything on primetime network TV and even filters out commercials. That Genie can let you watch already recorded episodes right away and pull from any broadcasts its finds may give it a leg up, but so far we haven’t seen recommendation systems good enough to promote switching from one service to another. Hit the source links for more details on how it all works, along with a video preview, also embedded after the break.

Continue reading DirecTV HR34 DVR ‘Genie’ recommendations and autorecording get previewed ahead of fall launch

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD

DirecTV HR34 DVR ‘Genie’ recommendations and autorecording get previewed ahead of fall launch originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 22 Sep 2012 19:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Believe it or not, most people still start their TV watching routine by hitting the guide button and browsing. After that, they might check to see what’s on the DVR, and eventually make their way through the streaming options available on their smart TV or game console. Dijit Media wants to change that with the new NextGuide iPad app which sets out to answer the age old question of “what am I going to watch next?” Essentially this hyper personal guide knows whats on TV, what your friends are watching and lets you easily filter by things like category, Facebook likes or even keywords in the metadata. Discovering content is the key theme here, but integration with other services like Rotten Tomatoes and the ability to schedule recordings on your DVR are also in the cards — currently scheduling recordings only works with DirecTV, but we’re told more are on the way. Although from the same company, NextGuide doesn’t work with the Beacon so you’ll need to keep using the Dijit remote for the majority of your remote needs, but both products will live on even though Dijit’s focus is on NextGuide, for now.

Continue reading NextGuide for iPad intends to get you to stop using the grid guide

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Tablets, HD

NextGuide for iPad intends to get you to stop using the grid guide originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 07 Sep 2012 14:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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With this year’s National Football League season almost ready to kick off (not taking pre-season games into consideration, of course), DirecTV’s properly preparing itself on all entertainment cylinders. The satellite provider announced earlier today that the well-known Sunday Ticket package will be returning to the PlayStation 3 on September 4th via a PS Store update, allowing current subscribers to stream full-HD games directly to Sony’s renowned console. As for those without any current attachments to DirecTV, however, there is an option out there — one which costs a familiar $300 per NFL season. We’ve still got a few days until the madness gets started, which should be plenty of time to get approval from your better half to snag the action-packed ticket.

Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD

DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket returns to PS3 in time for the upcoming football season originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Aug 2012 22:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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