Paying extra $10 to watch HD TV?

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@EarlWayneEller wrote:

Can you get hd tv on the family plan

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Yes, for the same $10/month HD technology fee that applies to the other tiers (except U-450, in which it is included).  Visit channel 9910 on your U-verse TV to order it.

That is exactlly my point.  especially in the US where technology is the best in the world.  one should only be paying extra for channels you want to see and no how you want to see it.  so why not add the 10 dollars to all the packages remove all those crappy channels and have all packages in HD. and let the user decices what channels he wants. Anyway .. people are moving away from paying those useless packages when they can get hd channels from other ways ie. internet, amazon stick, roku, neflix. free antenna, etc.  I hope someone in top should start thinking and be smart and offer better service.  

This is still an issue.  In everything online that I saw, HD is included.  It is shown in all channel guides, it says it in the U200 description, but no HD without $10.  Then, talking to an online rep, there are evidently two different U200 offerings, one includes HD, the other does not.  I do not see two different packages, and no where does it say "HD channels are extra" in any of the language I could find.  I dropped U450 because I no longer watch the premium channels, and expected HD to remain.  Surprise, Surprise - AT&T still wants to charge extra for HD.  So disappointed - I only wish I lived in a Verizon or Comcast service area....

Technology fee that's funny. Do you remember when they used to charge you for text messages back in the day. Looking back it's just kind of silly just like charging extra for HD.... technology fee lol

Technology fee that's funny. Do you remember when they used to charge you for text messages back in the day. Looking back it's just kind of silly just like charging extra for HD.... technology fee lol.

Be happy the uverse wasn't around when they "invented" color tv or we would still also probably be paying extra for that too!   I only got HD as part of a u300 promo package a couple of years ago (when they actually had  decent promos for uverse users).  Before that I was quite happy with SD (IMO basically the same information content anyhow) and it was just the principle of the thing.  I swore I would never separately pay for HD. 

When my promo was ove and went back to U200 I broke down and reluctantly started paying the $10, not because I wanted to continue using the HD, but because I was too lazy to reprogram all my many series records to the SD counterparts because the stupid series record settings don't allow you simply change the channel for an entry.  90% of those many entries simply require subtracting 1000 from the channel number.  It was bad enough going from the SD I once had to the HD series record in the promo.  I really don't want to go through with all that again going back.  I bet that series record limitation is no accident specifically to cause this kind of headache.

Afterthought:

Note, assuming when HD was first introduced there was additional equipment att needed to handle it (certainly was for the tv stations).  Maybe it made sense to charge extra to pay the HD equipment and transmission changes.  But by now those costs are more than covered and $10 for each HD subscriber sounds to me like way more than it should cost to maintain that additional equipment.

@David4820  For someone who claims that they've dropped Uverse and gone with another provider, you sure hang out on the UVerse TV forums a lot!  

Not that there's anything wrong with that....