DirecTV Stream has made a small change to its cloud DVR by allowing recordings to be stored for up to nine months. This is an improvement for existing subscribers considering recordings could previously only be kept for a maximum of 90 days. However, the DirecTV Stream DVR experience still has some limitations that consumers should be aware of.
The use of a cloud DVR is one of the main benefits of a live TV streaming service. Although these services do offer the ability to watch on-demand content, not everything shown on the live TV channels automatically becomes available to watch on-demand. With a DVR, however, consumers can set and record as much live TV content as they want and watch at a time that suits them.
That’s in theory anyway. Most live TV service employ limits when it comes to the DVR and DirecTV Stream is no exception. After previously limiting recordings to ninety days, DirecTV has now increased the limit to nine months. The change has gone into effect this week with the DirecTV Stream website now listing the 9-month DVR for those signing up to the service for the first time. Existing subscribers are also being notified of the DVR upgrade which applies to them as well.
With the ability to store recordings for up to nine months, DirecTV Stream’s DVR is now more in line with some other services including YouTube TV. However, that’s only in terms of how long recordings are stored for. DirecTV Stream still employs some other limitations that can affect the DVR experience. For example, unlimited DVR customers are only able to record and store a maximum of 30 episodes for any single TV series. For those DirecTV Stream subscribers that are limited to 20 hours of cloud DVR, the limitation is a maximum of 10 episodes per TV series.
Technically, this limitation also affects the ability to store recordings for up to 9 months. For example, once the maximum episode limit is reached, and new episodes are scheduled to be recorded, DirecTV Stream will automatically delete the oldest recorded episodes. This will happen regardless of whether the oldest recordings are nine months old or not. Still, for many DirecTV Stream subscribers, the increase to nine months is a DVR upgrade compared to what was offered before.
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