Pause, rewind, forward live tv

Hello @Ludwick577. We hear you and want to help!

I would like to share some info about the DIRECTV stream service, the special feature of forward/rewind is available with a DIRECTV streaming device, we can add one in your account to be able to enjoy these amazing features. 

Regarding the local forecast on your service, here you select local and, you can find with your zip code, the local channels from your area. 

Please try this out and let us know if it helps. 

Thank you for contacting us!  

David, DIRECTV Community Specialist. 

I know how to find local channels, that is not what I was talking about. Regarding The Weather Channel. On satellite directv that channel is cutomized with your local forest where you live. The Weather Channel on Dtv stream is a generic national feed that doesn't give your local forecast and doesn't have your local town on the scroll on the bottom.

I would certainly like to forward live TV. Then I could rush out and bet on a game that hasn't finished yet.

Thanks for wasting my time having to come in and check your "reply" after I received a notification. And you know what I mean. If we rewind live tv then u should be able to ff it. 

Regarding Live TV, the pause and rewind options at the moment are only available on the "Osprey" box (DirecTV Stream box), Apple TV devices and ROKU devices. Also on mobile devices, e.g. tablets and mobiel phone. It is not available yet on Firesticks and Samsung TV's.

Yah I received my dtv stream box today. Wish they had 4 or 5 channels with a buffer.

I've never experienced a TV device (streaming or cable) that would capture multiple live streams at once (other than by explicitly recording) - the most I've seen are ones that will do that for the stream you are currently watching.

However, they have been adding pause of live stream (with rewind/FF) to the apps individually, so they will hopefully get to FireTV soon.  Note that unlike some cable (and satellite?) systems (with on-premise DVRs), even on the apps that support it you can only rewind back to the point you hit pause - it doesn't start recording as soon as you switch to a channel.

Tivo's have 6 tuners with buffers. So do regular directv genie's but I think there are more tuners it's been a few years since I had regular directv.  Tivo keeps 45 minutes of buffer for each of the 6 tuners and when u switch to one of them u can rewind etc. Yah Tivos have their own hard drive but I was wondering if "tuners" are possible with a cloud dvr.

I was under the impression those devices had multiple tuner to allow multiple different TVs to watch different programs and/or to allow recording multiple different programs - not to allow a single user to have multiple shows "in flight".  I'm not sure how that would work.  DirecTV Stream works differently - there is no "tuner" or main device.  Instead, each TV has its own streaming device that can work independently, so however many streams they allow (currently 20 within the home network) is the number of different TVs that can be supported (each requiring its own device), but a single user at a single TV (with a single device) only gets one stream.  And recording using the cloud DVR is unrelated to either devices or streams - a single user can have effectively unlimited recordings at the same time, since they happen back in DirecTV's servers - not on a user device.  

How on a TiVo does a user say they want to watch 6 particular channels at the same time so the TiVo device knows to record those 6 channels?  If you have to explicitly select them, you can do the equivalent on DirecTV Stream by asking that those 6 (or 10 or 40) channels record - and you can watch them while they are recording.  Switching among the channels that you are recording is currently quite inconvenient (you have to do it through the DVR library rather than through the EPG or switching channels), but it is conceivable that they could make that simpler.  Also you can't rewind to before you started recording, but I assume on a TiVo you can't rewind to before you did something to tell the device this was a channel you were interested in being able to "keep".

U-Verse (AT&T's closest equivalent to cable, and the other AT&T service - now a DirecTV service - that I am really familiar with) keeps up to an hour history on the channel you are watching, starting when you switch to it - but it loses that history and starts a new one when you switch channels (that is, there is only one history kept at a time).  It is possible they could do something similar with DirecTV Stream - not requiring a pause to start the history (I believe one of their competitors does something like that).  But I don't see how it otherwise could automatically know what channels you were interested in - that is, without you explicitly selecting them (and effectively telling it to start recording).  U-Verse does use an on-premise "whole house" DVR (there is a specific STB that has a disk and is the DVR).  A user can to switch to a channel another user (that is using a different STB on a different TV) is watching, and take advantage of that user's recorded history for that channel.  But when they do that, they lose the history on the channel they had been watching.  So you are still limited to one at a time.

Tivo's have been around for over 20 years. Starting in 2000 they had 2 tuners and now Tivo's have 6 tuners. DTV Genie has 5 tuners and it's not for multiple tv's to watch. It's for 1 tv and when you switch back to any of those channels u can rewind. On my current Tivo Bolt, you hit the right arrow and 5 boxes come up on the right hand side of the screen with 5 channels you have recently watched (plus the 1 you are on) and you can switch back between them and they all have 45 minutes of buffer. U can also change one of those channels to something else so it starts buffering. U must live under a rock lol. All you have to do is google search tivo tuners or genie tuners. Here is a screenshot of how the tivo tuners work for example.

And I reliaze dtv stream box is a stream but I am sure it is possible for the stream box to keep several channels that you have recently watched on a buffer so when you go back to them you can rewind.

I understand the concept of multiple tuners. (U-Verse has something similar, but they are used for a combination of multiple TVs and recording.  You can watch - and rewind - any channel that is explicitly recording, or switch to a channel another TV is watching and gain access to its implicit history, but a single STB has only 1 implicit history at a time.)  I don't understand how TiVo can "know" which channels to track for a single user, unless the user somehow explicitly marks the channel.  (And there is nothing I can find on the TiVo site that talks about such a capability - just about being able to record multiple channels at the same time.)  It doesn't seem like it can just "track the last 6 channels I visited" and have that do what you want, because (assuming you channel surf) if you are on (making up channel numbers here) channel 100, which is HGTV, and you want to watch Animal Planet on channel 110, you surf through 9 other channels to get there, which would seem to mean that on the way they (passing more than 6 other channels) it would forget about HGTV rather than continue to track it.  I guess it could say "I will start tracking a channel if you stay on it for at least 3 minutes" or something like that and keep the last 6 channels you did that on, but that puts a fair amount on the user (to stay on a channel long enough for it to "lock") - almost as much as hitting a Record button.

(And your use of the term "buffer" - aside from confusing a lot of DirecTV Stream users for whom "buffering" is something bad, since the term has come to mean pauses while a stream disruption resolves - really means "implicitly record in the DVR with a sliding window".  That means on a TiVo, it comes at the expense of taking one of the tuners/streams that could be used for explicit recording - or watching on another TV.  So there are costs to that feature, especially in a multi-viewer household.  Those limitations don't exist with streaming services, since each TV/viewer is independent and the DVR is detached from the capabilities of the streaming device.  But by that same token, because it would use up a shared resource rather than your household's exclusive resources, it is something they would likely put more restrictions on.)

If you can define a good UI for this capability, then it would probably be possible to implement in a streaming w/cloud DVR environment (which is not to say that any company actually would).  Like I said, an alternative (which would seem more likely to be implemented) is one where you explicitly mark a channel by hitting Record (which you can do now) and then let you access the recordings while they are still happening by visiting the live channel (which they currently don't provide), though this would be tied to the program, not the channel, and would require you to manually delete the program when you are done.  An advance over that (closer to how you describe the TiVo capability) would be an explicit "tag" command (whether a different button or a selectable on-screen icon) that would mark a particular channel to track and keep a recording that is channel based rather than program based, was limited to a certain length of time (as a sliding window) and a certain number of concurrently tagged channels (probably also as a sliding window, although if I interpret the TiVo UI you show above correctly, something like that could let you explicitly drop a channel from being tracked and free that "slot"), and would implicitly delete that channel's history when it fell out of the tracked channel window (or was explicitly untracked) or when the app exits.  This would have to be all on-screen on commodity streamers (Roku, FireTV, AppleTV) since there are no buttons on the remote that could control any of it - less clear on DirecTV's own streaming device.

Would they do any of this?  I'd think accessing an on-going recording by selecting that channel (rather than having to explicitly go through the DVR directory) is a possibility.  Implicitly starting to record a channel when you switch to it rather than only when you hit pause is a possibility.  Keeping more than 1 implicit recording at once or providing explicit recording by channel rather than by program seems much less likely (to me).

Will they do any of this?  As AT&T, I would have said no - their track history of basically not adding new features over time (with the fairly recent exception of finally adding pause/rewind/FF to live streams) would make me doubt they'd have put that much effort in.  As DirecTV, which doesn't have other (more profitable) businesses to steal focus and development dollars, and which is facing competitors (in their only business) that have more functional offerings, maybe.

You are really ignorant and I am done with you. I have had a tivo for 20 years and the last five years they have had 6 tuners and you choose which channel each tuner is on and they buffer 45 minutes so you can rewind then forward. Do u know what google search is?? Google search tivo bolt 6 tuners and read for yourself. 

I assume that Directv Stream contracts for a scaled-back version of the Weather Channel. Thus, why we cannot get local weather information.   Having the Weather Channel for decades on Comcast/Spectrum, the studio set is different as well as the media announcers.  Waste of money for Directv Stream to not contract to get viewer local weather information.  For local employers and business to not have own local weather information is good reason to switch to a cable package that will provide this.  

I just got Directv Streaming.  Am confused about the difference between scheduling a show to record and bookmarking.  I have several series I have scheduled to record, but do I need to bookmark too?

Just got direct TV after switching from cable. Big difference is I now cannot pause a show. It does pause but when I hit play it starts up at the current spot not the spot I paused it. Hate this!