Earlier this year, AT&T’s streaming service DirecTV Now got all grown-up with the addition of a cloud DVR. Well, actually, it was more like hitting puberty than full adulthood — the Cloud DVR service DirecTV Now introduced in May was just a beta, not a fully-fledged feature.
But now, AT&T is ready to roll out Cloud DVR to all of its subscribers and formalize the feature. That’s good news for DirecTV Now’s nearly-2 million subscribers, but for everyone who was already using the Cloud DVR beta, it’s a sad day.
Starting August 29th, True Cloud DVR will be available to all customers on a DirecTV Now plan. The service comes with 20 hours of free recording (and seemingly a 30-day recording limit), which lets you access any recorded program from any device. It’s a big technological step forward from the days of scheduling recordings days in advance but only being able to stream them on one device.
For the customers who have been using the beta version of True Cloud DVR, however, this is a big step backwards. The beta version included 100 hours of free DVR recording, which took the feature from “oh yeah I’ll just record the evening news and a sports game” all the way up to a way to have an on-demand library of TV and movies.
Going forward, it seems like DirecTV Now will have a free 20 hours of cloud DVR available to customers, with expansion options like 50 or 120 hours of additional DVR storage available for an added cost, according to Multichannel.
