But at some point I just gave up. I moved to AT&T uVerse fell in love with the multi-room feature and didn’t look back. But then I moved to Seattle, WA. I had to break up with AT&T and was forced into a relationship with Comcast and their 1990s style DVR. To put it simply Comcast sucked. I brought in an AppleTV, hacked it but was generally left unfulfilled. I attached an old laptop to the TV to run Netflix, Amazon Unbox and Hulu.

At this point my living room was looking like the service center at Best Buy. There had to be a better way to get all this stuff in one place? I looked at the Roku and Boxee Box. But I wanted local, HD (didn’t want to pay for it) and DVR capabilities.

Well, those naughty little folks over at TIVO pushed out an offer I couldn’t refuse. A new TIVO Premiere for zero down and $19 per month. It supports my HD antenna, Netflix, Amazon Unbox and will soon support Hulu. My monhtly TV costs have gone from $100 per month to less than $30 — and I get what I want, not a smorgusboard of channels I never watch.

Sales pitch over!

Look at all that stuff!

A thing of beauty

There is no doubt that AT&T gambled (a lot) and won (a lot) with their bet on the iPhone. So let’s call it a success and move on.

What I think is a more interesting question to ponder: when will AT&T better leverages its quad-play (home phone, cell, Internet and IPTV) offerings to begin really owning the digital home. I am not talking about discounted package deals and single billing statements. Yawn.  What I am talking about is going into an AT&T store seeing a big, beautiful HDTV and getting it for free or near free (say $20 per month) for signing a 2 year commitment for new IPTV and Internet service.

When this happens, AT&T would not only drive up subscribers, but drive HDTV sales and services through the roof. I love going into Best Buy, but if AT&T was willing to off set the cost of a new HDTV like they do for cell phones, I’d be the first in line.

If you are a tech-nerd like me, take a step back before you blast me on the disadvantages of bundling. I know the customer service issues needed to be dealt with first! But most people don’t want to be CIOs of their house. They want a simple solution to bring everything together. And think — what’s the next logical step once all these things are connected together? Access to advanced content and services. Not just movies, but critically needed services such as remote home network management, off-site file back-ups (documents, movies, photos and videos), managed DRM so you can move content from one device to another (legally), and much much more.

I am not the first to prognosticate about the future of telco and cable companies (sorry satellite), so believe this isn’t a matter of if this will happen, but when. And when it does… that will be a hell of thing to be able to promote. Much more interesting than bundled billing!