There’s a war under way for your TV.
AT & T; Inc. has been heavily pushing its U-Verse TV service to Orange County homes for more than a year now.
The move is part of Dallas-based AT & T;’s bid to go after its cable company rivals, who have gotten into AT & T;’s mainstay phone business.
AT & T; won’t say how many OC customers it’s signed up for U-Verse, which to viewers works similarly to cable TV.
“I think we are rapidly gaining share,” said Kurt Engstrom, general manager of the greater Los Angeles area for AT & T.; “We are the new entrant into this. But it has been received well and we continue to make it available to as many customers as we can.”
U-Verse uses fiber-optic cables and technology similar to DSL Internet service to offer broadcast and cable channels to homes.
In OC, AT & T; is going after customers of New York-based Time Warner Cable Inc., which serves most of North County, St. Louis-based Charter Communications Inc., which serves parts of North County, and Atlanta-based Cox Communications Inc., which serves South County.
“We are pushing them to step up their game,” Engstrom said. “Everyone is having to react to the splash we have made.”
A spokesperson for Cox Communications said the company isn’t worried about mass defections to other TV services.
“We know that some customers will try these new (television) services, but in other markets where they’re available, we’ve already seen many customers come back to Cox,” said spokeswoman Ayn Craciun. “We’re not seeing much activity (from AT & T;) in the southern and central parts of Orange County that Cox serves.”
New York-based Verizon Communications Inc. offers a similar service to AT & T;’s, though the two don’t directly compete with each other.
AT & T; offers U-Verse in areas where it offers phone service, which includes most of OC. Verizon also offers TV where it provides phone service, which in OC is along the coast.
And, just as with cable, the phone companies also compete with satellite TV services.
Part of AT & T;’s pitch is that U-Verse
customers don’t have to sign a contract as they do with satellite, Engstrom said.
U-Verse’s overall subscriber count still is small. The service has been rolled out in the West and Midwest, but isn’t big on the East Coast.
Nationwide, AT & T; has about 781,000 U-Verse subscribers, up 42% from the second quarter.
The company is predicting it will pass a target of 1 million subscribers by the year’s end.
U-Verse “is the growth engine and probably the most critical part of what we are doing in the consumer part of our business,” Engstrom said.
AT & T; is borrowing from cable’s playbook by offering deals on a bundled package of TV, Internet and phone service.
So far, AT & T; has sold U-Verse through its own stores, TV ads, heavy direct mail marketing and door-to-door salespeople.
Now AT & T; plans to sell U-Verse through Wal-Mart and Circuit City stores.
The company is set to have salespeople in the stores to pitch U-Verse to customers looking to buy TVs.
AT & T; has a similar deal with Best Buy Co.
It picked the chains because of “their overall footprint in the market and their traffic,” Engstrom said.
Digital video recorders are a big part of AT & T;’s push. It runs a blog, coolerthancable.com, which talks up features of U-Verse’s digital video recorder, including the ability to record four shows at once and watch recorded shows on any set in the house.
“DVR is central to it,” Engstrom said. “The majority of our customers have multiple TVs.”
Basic U-Verse packages go for $70 to $160 a month. AT & T; says its most popular package is a mid-level plan that goes for about $115 to $140, depending on the speed of Internet service.
The least expensive package starts at $44 a month and doesn’t include Internet access. Verizon and a few satellite providers have starting deals at less than $50 a month.
AT & T; plans to start marketing new features that allow consumers to do more computer-like tasks on their big screens, according to Engstrom.
As it is now, users can view photos, search for local restaurants, check stocks and follow a fantasy football team on U-Verse.
“The future of this platform and where we are going with it is to make it interactive,” Engstrom said.
