How does DirecTV whole home DVD work?

Heinz

From what I read HERE, the USA's DirectTV's whole home DVR system looks so much more advanced than Sky multiroom.

However, their online blurb is all very well:

Our expert technicians will connect and network your receivers, ensuring that your Whole-Home DVR service experience is seamless.

But how does it work? What does 'connect and network' involve?

Kurtis_Blue

You have one main server and every other TV has a receiver, so their "technicians" put them in and create the home network. Easy?

We run similar things over here for high end audio, and many media player network solutions exist using your wifi router, just not connected to a subscription TV package.

InsideInsurance

It and Sky Multiroom aren't comparable.

Sky Multi Room is a tuner in each room you have it which whilst they share a common dish (in most cases) are otherwise independent.

With this you have a central hub that contains the tuner, a DVD player and a recorder. It then streams the information from the hub to the individual TVs.

A very quick look shows a couple of interesting tricks, like being able to switch rooms and instantly continue watching where you'd left off but the majority of the function can be achieved with a variety of pieces of kit on the market already or in some cases the necessary function is built into TVs and you just need the hub.

Heinz

Are you talking about wired or 2.4GHz streaming?

InsideInsurance

Could be wired or you can do it wirelessly.

The high end systems recommend having a wired solution on a separate switch to the rest of your network but as a more basic solution I have an AppleTV on each of our TVs all connected wirelessly with various computers, iPhones, iPads etc as well as our VOIP phone system and have no issues with streaming different content to different TVs at the same time (though with apple TV it is 720p rather than the 1080i of SkyHD)