IP Democracy: AT&T to Launch HomeZone Service in Q2 05

In this interview with Business Week’s Roger O. Crockett, AT&T CFO Randall Stephenson says that the telco/soon-to-be-IPTV provider plans to launch in Q2 its HomeZone product, a new service called which integrates the Internet with the TV set via a DSL-enabled set-top box.

We will be announcing what we call Home Zone. This changes how you think about broadband and TV. I have a beta version of it in my house right now. It’s a set-top box. They removed my old Dish Network satellite set-top and replaced it with this one. It’s connected to my TV and stereo, and it has DSL connectivity on it. I can now get Movielink (a Web site where full-length movies can be downloaded to a PC) coming into my TV set via DSL. I also can sit back and look at all my digital photos on my TV. I can listen on my stereo to the music library on my PC. I can sit back using my TV remote control and access my music library on my PC. Were going out and working on a lot of content relationships to take advantage of this. We’ll be bringing this to market in the second quarter.

HomeZone is sort of an interim step toward full-fledged IPTV and is aimed at AT&T’s Dish Network customers. Customers who subscribe to both AT&T and Dish will be able to combine video services with Internet functionality and do such things as get caller i.d. on the TV set, view web-delivered video content and access online music services.

As far as the true IPTV offering, Stephenson says it’s still on track and that the telco will be rolling it out “in very measured terms” during the May-June time frame. He also notes that they still haven’t mastered HDTV in the test-run, but that HD will be part of the commercial roll-out (I’m very leery of how successful AT&T can be until they get HDTV incorporated into the IPTV offering).

Stephenson also says that AT&T will roll out “in mass” the Yahoo Go phone in Q2, which interconnects Yahoo services via mobile phone and Internet-enabled TV.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on February 2, 2006 7:56 AM to IP Democracy