Unlike regular cable and satellite TV, U-Verse’s IPTV system sends only the channel that has been requested to a subscriber’s IPTV tuner. (Cable and satellite systems send all channels down their transmission lines, and the tuner then displays just the one channel the customer selects.) By only transmitting the needed channels, the system can devote more bandwidth to other services.

The Las Vegas demo offered multiple camera angles of an event, thumbnails of multiple channels, and telephone caller ID information across the screen. If the customer wants to take an incoming call, whole-house DVR functionality pauses the live TV program. Once the call is finished, the viewer can transfer the program to another room and continue watching where they left off.

The company says it will also offer a wide variety of video-on-demand programs, too, accessed through a customizable program guide. With all programming residing on the company’s servers until requested, the amount of video on demand it offers is limited only by its computer capacity. SBC won’t say which services it will provide upon launch, now scheduled for early 2006.

Because everything will operate through the IP network, many devices will easily talk to one another, according to Jeff Weber, vice president of product and strategy at SBC. For example, a consumer can take a picture with a Cingular (an SBC company) picture phone and that photo will automatically be transmitted to the Yahoo! Photos website. Then, the customer can transmit the photos via the IP network to any TV in the house. Similarly, the user can download music and then, as in any networked home, transfer it to any room of the house.

Cell phones will become an integral part of U-Verse, as they could be used to remotely program various aspects of the U-Verse home network, or even display video programs that are part of the subscriber’s package. To make all this happen, SBC is spending $4 billion to extend fiber-optic cable to 50 percent of its voice subscriber households, or 18 million homes. For its investment, the company will create a system that can deliver at least 20Mbps of data to the home. Using the MPEG-4 compression standard, that’s equivalent to three simultaneous standard-definition channels, plus one HD channel.