After years of development, AT&T is discontinuing what it now calls Mobile DVR on March 4. While some of the enthusiast forums are all abuzz and angry about this move, my guess is that most people didn’t even know the feature existed. Before we say goodbye, let’s talk about how we got here.aluminum die casting alloys
This little box was originally called Nomad. It was developed about a decade ago to help people take their recorded programming with them. The idea was that it would download programs from your DVR, sample them to a manageable size, and put them on your iPhone. You can read the original review I did while working at another site here.
Nomad was problematic because it could take ten hours or more to downsample a movie. Then, it could take another half hour to transfer that movie to your phone. While it was the sort of thing you could do overnight, it wasn’t a good fit for everyone.The next generation, renamed to GenieGO, added more speed and more features. In our initial review, we talked about increased speed and the ability to stream programs from your home network. You could set up programs to “Prepare-N-Go” meaning that it could still take several hours to get a movie ready to stream, but it would happen in the background and you could even set something like series links so that commonly watched shows were always ready.
Sadly, GenieGO was discontinued in 2016, but the technology didn’t die. It was built into HR44 and HR54 DVRs (and later into Genie 2 servers.)The technology that had originally gone into the GenieGO box was added, via software, to Genie DVRs. You can read our 2016 review here.
Mobile DVR seemed like a really good solution because it could automatically prepare all your recorded shows as needed, so you could stream almost instantly. It also integrated with the regular DIRECTV app so you no longer needed a separate one
However, there were still some concerns. Mobile DVR content was always standard-def quality, whether it was transferred to your device or streamed from home. Some people found that when they wanted a program, they didn’t get the one from home. Instead they got the on-demand version from AT&T servers. The picture quality was great, but they lost the ability to skip commercials in some cases.
