Instagram can now automatically archive your Stories

Last week, The Next Web reported on a bunch of new features Instagram was reportedly testing out and today, the platform is giving users two new ways to manage Stories. The first is the rumored Story archive. Now, Instagram will automatically save your Stories after their 24 hours are up and they’ll exist in a separate archive section of your profile. You’ll be able to rewatch Stories, add them to posts or add them to a new Story. And if you decide you don’t want those Stories sticking around, you can turn off auto-archiving whenever you want.

Your archived Stories can also be used in the second new addition to Instagram. Underneath the bio in your profile, there will now be a section called Stories Highlights. They’re collections of previously shared Stories that will stay posted to your profile for as long as you want them there and you can have as many of them as you want. To make one, tap the “New” circle underneath your bio and select any stories you want to add from your new archive. You’ll then pick a cover image and name the Highlight and then it’s there for any of your followers to see at any time. To edit or delete them, just tap and hold.

Both features are rolling out now.

Image: Instagram

Source: Instagram

My $200,000 bitcoin odyssey

This was not what I expected to be doing with my October. But there I was, on a flight to Hong Kong, hoping I would be able to retrieve $200,000 worth of bitcoin from a broken laptop.

Four years ago, I was living in Hong Kong when a fellow journalist named Mike* and I decided to invest in bitcoin. I bought four while Mike went in for 40; I spent about $2,000 while he put in $15,000. At the time, it seemed super speculative, but over the years, bitcoin surged and Mike seemed downright prescient. I had since relocated to Los Angeles and had been texting Mike about the 2,000 percent rise in our investment.

*Name changed for anonymity.

Strangely, I wasn’t getting much of a response from him. He had 10 times as many bitcoins as I did — shouldn’t he at least have been excited? Finally, when the price of one bitcoin broke $4,000 this summer, I sent him this message: “You do still have those bitcoins right?” That’s when he broke it to me: “Maybe not …”

Here’s what happened: At some point in 2013, Mike had rightfully become concerned about security. He initially kept his coins in an exchange called LocalBitcoins. Exchanges are commonly used to buy and sell cryptocurrency, but you shouldn’t keep your coins there. The most infamous bitcoin scandal to date was when Mt. Gox, an exchange based in Japan, lost 850,000 of its users’ bitcoins.

Exchanges can also suddenly close, as some did in China this year when the Chinese government suddenly made them illegal. Any serious cryptocurrency investor will tell you that your coins are best kept in “cold storage” (an offline hardware wallet). That’s what I’d done with mine, but Mike hadn’t gone that far three years ago when he started thinking about security. Instead, he set up a software wallet. It was a good step, but he would soon learn, it was not foolproof.

Today, there are many sophisticated and intuitive wallet options, but choices were narrower in 2013. Mike used MultiBit, which was popular at the time but has since been discontinued due to numerous flaws.

It’s obvious MultiBit was written in a hurry: The interface is counterintuitive, presenting you with a prominent button that says “create wallet” that allows you to generate new wallets inside the software. Most users only need one wallet, but MultiBit practically demands that you set up multiple. On top of this, it allows you to add multiple passwords to each wallet, even though these aren’t required. With only a few minutes of clicking, you could create dozens of wallets, each with dozens of passwords. In short, it has a lot of room for error.

In March 2014, on an unseasonably sweaty night in Hong Kong, Mike created a new wallet on Multibit, moved his 40 bitcoins into it and then added a password. In the infinite wisdom of the MultiBit programmers, there was no option to double-confirm the password. Hope you typed it in right! The problem was, Mike knew he hadn’t. He tried what he thought was the password, and it was rejected. Again and again he was bounced. His finger had slipped when he entered the password, he was sure of it — there was an extra keystroke somewhere. But which key, and where?

Since Mike was in the bitcoin game for the long haul, he moved on after a week or two of trying and retrying his password. The years ticked by, and the bitcoin price languished for between $200 and 400, so it didn’t feel urgent. He figured that there would be a solution one day, and so he put his 2007 MacBook with his MulitBit wallet in a safe corner of his office, where it quietly died from a motherboard failure.

Mike called me earlier this year. “I have to tell you the truth, and this is a major mental block for me, but I may have totally lost my bitcoins.” He told me about the now dead laptop and the MultiBit fiasco. He spoke like he was in a confessional, cowed with shame and begging for forgiveness. The price of bitcoin at that time put Mike’s loss at about $180,000 and rising. He told me he was planning to fly to the offices of KeepKey, the new owners of the legacy MultiBit products, and … pray maybe? I told him to wait.

As I listened to his problem, I got it into my head that I could fix this for him, even though I wasn’t sure how. I knew a fair bit about how bitcoin wallets work, but I was certainly no expert. I guess I liked the tantalizing challenge — after all, bitcoin was skyrocketing, and we were approaching $200,000 of real stakes here. In short, it was worth a shot.

Getting the hard drive from his old MacBook would be easy, just a matter of plugging the drive into a new computer. The challenge was the MultiBit side of things. I tracked down an old version of the now discontinued software and discovered that there were multiple ways to restore wallets using MultiBit. The software generates encrypted backups for each wallet, and it also encrypts separate backups of the private keys. The entire program and all wallets inside of it could also be restored from the seed words, but Mike had, of course, lost those too.

It soon became clear that we had, at best, a 50 percent chance of success: We could either decrypt a wallet backup or a key backup. To do either, we’d have to use a password that Mike would have to remember. I broke the news to him, and he offered to pay me a percentage of whatever we could recover. Although I could try to restore his wallet remotely, he wanted me to come and sit there with him. This was as much a personal failure as an IT failure, and he needed someone to share the experience with.

I arrived in Hong Kong at the beginning of the Mid-Autumn Festival. This is the full moon festival, celebrating the fall solstice. In Hong Kong, this means several days of public holiday.

First things first, we had a technician from one of Hong Kong’s bustling computer malls transfer the data off the dead hard drive — we got him on his last day before the holiday. Retrieving the data was an easy enough operation. Soon, we were looking at the MultiBit backup files on my computer: So far, so good.

It’s helpful here to understand what a bitcoin actually is. The best explanation I’ve heard is metaphorical: Money began as a physical object, and then it shifted to become your identity (i.e., your name on your bank account). But cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are virtual objects, which means they exist in the digital space, not tied to anyone’s identity.

Like a digital dollar bill, a bitcoin can be traded, stolen or lost. But this is still just a symbolic representation of the actual fact: A bitcoin is really just a cryptographically locked address on the blockchain, so rather than having a bitcoin “on” your computer, what you actually have is the private key that can unlock a bitcoin’s location on the blockchain. It was that key that we were searching for in Mike’s mess of MultiBit folders.

Now that we had the backup files, it was time to get to unlocking. Mike had seemingly created half a dozen or so different wallets when he was securing his bitcoins — no doubt, a result of the software’s baffling interface. The good ol’ process of elimination would narrow this down to the wallet that was the ultimate destination for the bitcoin. We loaded up the first wallet file and entered the password Mike had intended to type all of those years ago, and it unlocked. That was a good sign: It meant we knew the password Mike remembered actually worked with at least some wallets — just not, perhaps, the only one that mattered. The wallet started syncing to the blockchain.

The blockchain is often described as a decentralized public ledger. In practical terms, that means it’s a long list of every transaction that has ever occurred. It’s “decentralized” because every transaction is confirmed via a math problem solved by computers set up as “miners.” Updating the chain from years ago would take time — about 80 minutes in our case. The full moon was rising in Hong Kong, and we ate Thai food, anxiously waiting for the blockchain to sync.

Each time we saw the $200,000 worth of coins arrive on Nov. 20th, 2013, and vanish on March 20th, 2014.

We watched as the wallet displayed 40 bitcoins arriving on Nov. 20th, 2013. It also displayed the current value: $200,000.

This looked like success, but I urged caution: The chain was still four years behind present day. And sure enough, when March 20th, 2014, rolled around, the balance in the wallet dropped to $0 as all the bitcoins were transferred out.

We went through four or five other wallets, waiting more than an hour for the blockchain to sync to each one, and each time we saw the $200,000 worth of coins arrive on Nov. 20th, 2013, and vanish on March 20th, 2014. At some point it stopped being tragic and started becoming darkly comical.

At 1 AM, we checked another wallet. This time, March 20th, 2014, passed, and the coins remained. We waited an agonizing additional half hour for the blockchain to finish syncing, and … the balance stayed. We had found what we were looking for.

All that was left was to transfer the coins out of this mess and into a modern wallet (we decided on using Exodus, which is easy to use, simple and secure). But the transfer asked for another password. Remember, MultiBit lets you add additional passwords to wallets. This is what Mike had done on that sweaty night back in 2014. We tried the password we knew, and … wrong. We tried again and again, carefully calling out each character as we entered it. Wrong, wrong, wrong. We had found ourselves on the bad side of the fifty-fifty.

Why does MultiBit encourage you to use multiple passwords? Why doesn’t it at least ask you to confirm your password before saving it? So many questions, shouted into the obsolete software void.

Mike, despairing, wanted to give up, but I hadn’t flown halfway around the world for nothing. We opened a spreadsheet and started logging different permutations of the password, trying to brute-force our way through his keystroke error. But after 50 attempts, it seemed like a Sisyphean task. MultiBit accepts all characters, cases, symbols and spaces as valid password characters — the number of potential solutions were staggering. We turned the air conditioning off in Mike’s apartment in an attempt to recreate the “sweaty” temperatures Mike recalled from the fateful night, but nothing worked.

We checked all of his email correspondence from around that date. We found that, teasingly, he had emailed himself three times the day after March 20th about his MultiBit fuckup, but each email was useless, containing irrelevant information Mike thought was important. Mike was a journalist: Perhaps he wrote down password possibilities in a notebook when it was fresh in his mind? But as soon as I asked that question, we found a 2014 Google Chat he had with me five days after the fiasco: In it, Mike told me he was feeling flustered and did some cleaning and threw out all of his notebooks.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

We then resigned ourselves to a new eternal hobby: We figured we’d be trying out various password combinations for as long as we lived, and if the value of bitcoin continued to rise, then we’d be all the more determined to crack this puzzle. Even in my cloud of optimism, this was clearly a recipe for Lovecraftian madness.

I began looking into writing a program that could brute-force permutations of the password, and Mike was becoming increasingly Zen-like. He sat on his sofa, stewing over the nature of the loss, while I turned to sift through his backup files. Suddenly, I was struck with an idea: The additional password that Mike created applied to the wallet itself, but perhaps it didn’t apply to the key backup file.

He sat on his sofa, stewing over the nature of the loss, while I turned to sift through his backup files.

I created a new wallet in MultiBit, loaded the key file and unlocked it with the password that we knew worked. As Mike rambled therapeutically about the fleeting nature of money, hopes, dreams, our lives and this very world, I watched as the blockchain synced. Nov. 20th, 2013, rolled around, and $200,000 showed up, as expected. Then March 20th rolled around, and … the balance stayed.

Interesting. I went to the “send” tab, where we had just spent five hours banging our head against the wrong password rock only to discover that the “send” button was active now, glowing and ready to click — no password required. This meant that I could click it and …

Holy bejesus, it worked.

The balance dropped to zero as the transaction was broadcast to the blockchain, and my heart rate spiked. This meant that, as soon as the transaction was confirmed, we would have control of these bitcoins in a new secure wallet.

You typically need two confirmations before a transaction clears to most wallets or exchanges, but you really want seven, which is considered irreversible. After 15 minutes, there were no confirmations. An hour passed. We still had zero confirmations.

We had just stumbled upon another reason that MultiBit is irretrievably broken software: The transaction fee is hard-coded at a miniscule amount. Transactions on the blockchain are confirmed by miners in exchange for a small cut — but in the three years since this wallet was first written, fees have climbed a magnitude over what was hard-coded into MultiBit. This meant that our fee was pathetically small and the transaction could be left to languish in the mempool (the list of pending transactions) forever. No miner would ever see it, let alone confirm it.

Hong Kong is beautiful at night, especially during the Mid-Autumn Festival. Everyone is at home or on vacation, and the streets are empty — and yet, the city does not feel turned off. It’s idling, waiting to start again. That night, the moon was the brightest and biggest it would be that year. And something unexpected happened in the strange moonlight.

The next morning, I checked the blockchain explorer to find that our transaction had five confirmations. How?! Mike and I rushed to a café to wait for the final two confirmations. As we waited, I furiously Googled and discovered that the mempool could get pretty low sometimes during periods of low transactions, such as … the Mid-Autumn Festival in China, where most bitcoin miners are located.

Eventually, the confirmations rolled in. By luck, the blockchain had delivered. In a weird way, Hong Kong, and the Mid-Autumn Festival, had delivered. It was a quiet morning in the cafe, but for a moment, the peace was broken by two idiots, cheering and high-fiving in front of a laptop.

In the darkest moments of that night with Mike, it seemed absurd that this encrypted address on a digital ledger mattered so much. But it’s no less absurd than the bills in my wallet or the figures in my bank account. Our economy is built on mutual belief and hope.

If something goes wrong in the traditional economy, there’s supposed to be someone there to help you. A hotline. A customer service rep. A support ticket. But with bitcoin, there was no institution to save us. We had to do that ourselves. People like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon ridicule cryptocurrencies, dismissing bitcoin as a scam, a Ponzi scheme or a bubble. But he is the institution, after all. He wants a world where we need a JPMorgan Chase to manage our money.

Wealth disparity is at record levels and the ultrarich have cornered the market on every asset class, but with bitcoin, an entirely new economy has sprung into existence. That’s the pitch for decentralized cryptocurrencies: They offer hope that there might be another, fairer way of doing things.

Just make sure you secure your hope properly.

Images: Steve Fung (inline Hong Kong); Mat Smith (plane wing)

Apple Acquires Podcast Search Startup ‘Pop Up Archive’

Apple has acquired podcast search startup Pop Up Archive, according to Harvard University’s Nieman Lab via AppleInsider.

Apple more or less confirmed the report by issuing its standard statement about acquisitions: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”

Pop Up Archive was an Oakland-based online platform focused on building tools to transcribe, organize, and search audio files, including a podcast search engine Audiosear.ch, according to the report.

Pop Up Archive was founded in 2012, and has since grown off an extended series of seed investments and grants from sources like Bloomberg Beta, 500 Startups, and the Knight Foundation, among others. The company also has a close relationship with PRX; in 2012, the two organizations partnered up to build PRX’s original web-based archive system.

Both the Pop Up Archive and Audiosear.ch websites state that operations shut down on November 28, 2017, presumably around the time Apple acquired the startup. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

While no other details about the acquisition were shared, it can be assumed that Pop Up Archive’s search tools could be used to improve podcast search and discovery in Apple’s official Podcasts app for iPhone and iPad.

Tag: Podcasts
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Apple’s iPhone X is available SIM-free in the US

Apple is offering another reason to nab its thousand-dollar smartphone. A month since the iPhone X landed, the handset is now selling SIM-free and unlocked in the US with full support for both CDMA and GSM networks. You should see the new “buy without a carrier” option on Apple’s online store, allowing you to ditch the likes of AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint. Click on it, and you’l be able to choose your finish (silver or space gray) and the storage: 64GB for $999 or 256GB for $1,149.

Apple put to bed initial reports of iPhone X shipping delays (over component shortages) by delivering the smartphone quicker than expected. Snap one up now, and you’ll get it as soon as December 12. If you’re eager, you can even collect in-store on the same day in select regions (just type in your zip code to peep the ETA in your area).

Source: Apple

Google embraces the notch with iPhone X Gmail update

First released on November 3rd, the iPhone X forced developers to scramble to adapt apps to that famous notch and the lack of a home button. Google is no exception, and after optimizing its productivity suite last week (Docs, Sheets and Slides), it’s now Gmail’s turn. No longer will you have to put up with a letterboxed view of your communications, as Google’s mail app now integrates the cutout in its top rail.

It’s a bit odd that it took Google until now to get to Gmail for the iPhone X, as it has already seen its way to updating Waze, YouTube, Google Home, Maps, and the aforementioned Drive apps. Luckily, iOS Gmail users will get more in the bargain than just the notch feature. Google has also added support for third-party email apps including iCloud, Outlook and Yahoo mail — a feature it first revealed in a beta not long ago.

BT Sport to offer 360-degree video highlights and replays

Tottenham Hotspur star Dele Allie weaves through three defenders before whipping a cross into the feet of Harry Kane. You jump out of your seat, only to let out a groan as the linesman blows his whistle and raises a flag for offside. But was it offside? You’re not so sure. If only you could get a different perspective… Enter the BT Sport app. The British broadcaster has announced today that it will soon offer 360-degree highlights and instant replays. They will be shown alongside standard replays for “a minimum of” 20 sporting events — including the UEFA Champions League, the Premier League, the FA Cup and World Title boxing — over the next six months.

The first supported fixtures will be Tottenham versus APOEL Nicosia (Champions League) on December 6th and Tottenham versus Manchester City (Premier League) on December 16th. These are big games (if you’re a fan of Pochettino and his merry men, anyway) which you’ll be able to watch from a variety of camera angles not available during the normal broadcast. That means you can review and debate key moments, or just marvel as Kevin De Bruyne, Leroy Sane and Raheem Sterling slowly dismantle Spurs’ title-winning hopes. Similar to Google’s YouTube app, all of the clips will be viewable with or without a compatible VR headset.

BT is far from the first sports broadcaster to experiment with 360-degree video. Sky has committed to virtual reality, with a range of 360-degree films from the Tour de France, Formula 1 and other sporting events. The BBC offered 360 video during last year’s Olympics, and across the pond the NBA is broadcasting every league game in VR. It’s not clear, however, how large the audience is for this sort of content. Watching through a headset is certainly novel, and the pitch-side view is a cheap substitute for being there in person. But a new standard for watching sport? I’m not so sure.

Fitbit’s Ionic will let you stream Deezer from your wrist

Fitbit’s Ionic smartwatch suffers from a dearth of apps, we noted in our Engadget review, but the wearable firm is trying to flip that equation with an update to its Fitbit OS. It brings over 100 new watch faces and 60 apps, including Yelp, Nest, Hue Lights and Flipboard. The most interesting one is Deezer, as it will run on the Ionic without a smartphone, lightening the load for runners and other athletes. The company also launched Fitbit Labs, a new effort to create apps that motivate athlete behavior changes and accelerate Fitbit’s pace of innovation.

The addition of more apps is a big deal for Fitbit, because as of now, the Ionic only supports Pandora, AccuWeather, Starbucks (in North America) and Strava. Along with those already mentioned, apps available today for free download include the female health tracking app Clue, Game Golf’s score tracker, which will give precise distances to the green, Surfline, The New York Times app, TripAdvisor and United Airlines. More are coming in January, including British Airways, Lyft and Walgreens.

The lack of music services is a sore point on the Fitbit Ionic, but Deezer will come to the device around the world later in 2018. The main takeaway is that you can listen to music offline and without the need for a phone, presumably on wireless headphones or earbuds like Apple’s AirPods. A full feature list isn’t available yet, but Deezer says that Premium Plus subscribers will get a personalized music experience and be able to use Flow, which creates a personalized soundtrack using smart data, editorial recommendations and analytics.

Fitbit has occasionally struggled with product and feature design, so Fitbit Labs is an effort to keep its apps, watchfaces and other software features on track. The company is using its savoir faire in data analysis and behavioral sciences “to test potential new features in the form of experimental apps and smart clock faces designed to motivate users and drive behavior change,” it wrote. There’s also a new APK for developers.

Fitbit Labs has built a few fanciful apps like Fitbit Pet, that keeps you active by caring for a virtual dog or cat, and Treasure Trek, a gamification app aimed at motivating you toward your step goals. Others include the Mood Log mood tracker, Tennis game-tracking app, and the Think Fast task-switching game that shows how sleep and nutrition impact your mental sharpness. Fitbit Pet is available now, and the other apps are coming by the end of the year.

Other new features include enhanced options for Fitbit Pay and the Fitbit Leaderboard directly on the Ionic watch. The company said it will continue to add new apps and clockfaces “throughout 2018 and beyond.”

It’s always an uphill battle for an individual manufacturer like Fitbit to get developers on board, considering that they may already be working on Android Wear and watchOS apps. Fitbit is a big enough player in the health and fitness game to make it work, but it’ll have to continue to develop and expand Fitbit OS and its Ionic lineup. The new OS and apps, available today for Ionic owners, will likely help that cause.

Samsung’s 512GB chip will give your phone PC-like storage

Samsung has begun mass production of the world’s first 512GB embedded Universal Flash Storage (eUFS), meaning its flagship phones can now hold double what they could last year, when the company released its 256GB version. Phones with the new chips can store up to 130 10-minute UHD videos.

Read and write performance has been given a boost, too. Sequential read and write speeds reach 860MB per second and 255MB per second respectively — not a huge increase on the 256GB chip but enough transfer a 5GB HD video clip to a solid state hard drive in around six seconds, or more than eight times faster than a standard microSD card. It also has a random read speed of 42,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) and a write speed of 40,000 IOPS.

Samsung pitched previous versions of this technology to the automotive market as cars will soon need to record high volumes of sensor data, but says at this time that next-gen smartphones and tablets are the best candidates for the chip, and plans to “steadily increase an aggressive production volume” to meet increasing demand for advanced mobile storage.

Via: Business Wire

Lifeprint Launches Larger WiFi-Equipped AR Photo Printer That’s Available Exclusively From Apple

Lifeprint, known for its photo printers that come equipped with augmented reality technology, today announced the launch of its latest printer, which is larger than the original version to let iPhone users print bigger pictures.

The new Lifeprint photo printer can print images that are 3 by 4.5 inches, up from 2 by 3 inches. WiFi is new to this version of the printer, which means you can print to a Lifeprint printer from anywhere in the world and send photos to printers owned by friends and family. Bluetooth is also available for local printing.

With Lifeprint printers, you also can print a still of a video or a Live Photo and then use the Lifeprint app to see an augmented reality version of the video, essentially bringing your photos to life. It’s a little bit gimmicky, but it can be a fun way to share videos with friends. It’s also a neat way to print and share Live Photos.

Like many of the miniature iPhone printers on the market, Lifeprint printers use ZINK paper, which allows for color images without ink cartridges. ZINK also has a sticky back, so all of your printed photos double as stickers. On the downside, ZINK is expensive at over $1 per photo when using the Lifeprint-branded paper in the new size.

You can print photos, videos, Live Photos, GIFs, Snaps, and more with Lifeprint, and the Lifeprint app has built-in tools for editing your images and adding stickers, filters, and captions. There’s also integration with Instagram and Facebook so you can print directly from your social network.

“For our second printer, we wanted to go bigger and broader. The larger film is classic instant camera size and really captures that retro look and feel. Perfect for decorating your walls. But more importantly the WiFi capability means you’re always connected. This allows users to print to and from anywhere in the world. No matter where you are, you’re connected and ready to print. And of course, the magical Harry Potter-like Hyperphotos still bring those videos to life in your hands. Super cool.”

Lifeprint’s new 3×4.5 printer is available exclusively from Apple.com and Apple retail stores for $149.99 starting today. Film is priced at $50 for a pack of 40 and $30 for a pack of 20.

Tag: Apple retail
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DirecTV Now Reaches 1M Subscribers While AT&T Continues to Promise DVR, 4K, and More Coming in 2018

AT&T this morning announced that its over-the-top streaming service DirecTV Now has surpassed the one million subscriber mark, with the milestone coming in just a little bit over a year since the service launched on November 30, 2016. DirecTV Now originally debuted only on iOS and Apple TV devices, and continues to promote the Apple TV in offers where new subscribers can pay for four months of service upfront ($140) and get an all-new 32GB Apple TV 4K ($180) for free.

In comparison, Sling TV is said to still sit at the top of the OTT streaming service bundle market with about 1.7 million subscribers as of Q3 2017. Around this time, Sling TV was followed by PlayStation Vue (455,000 subscribers), YouTube TV (325,000), Hulu with Live TV (150,000), and FuboTV (100,000), according to research firm Guggenheim Securities (via Variety). At the end of the same quarter this year, AT&T reported about 787,000 people had signed up for DirecTV Now, which has now grown to more than one million in just over two months.

“This milestone is an incredible testament to the thousands of hours many people spent working to bring this product online and continually improving it during the past year,” said David Christopher, president, AT&T Entertainment Group. “We’re thrilled so many customers have come to love DIRECTV NOW and can’t wait to bring them a host of new features in 2018.”

“To reach 1 million subscribers is an important benchmark for any OTT video service, but to go from zero to 1 million subscribers so quickly is quite an achievement,” said Brett Sappington, senior director of Research, Parks Associates.

As it celebrates the milestone, AT&T also looked forward into the New Year and listed a few upcoming features coming to the service in 2018. According to the company, subscribers can expect the following features to be added to DirecTV Now sometime next year:

– A DVR in the cloud to record your shows and access virtually anywhere
– 4K Ultra High Definition (UHD) quality video
– Capacity for more than 35,000 titles on demand
– Individual profiles
– Adding an additional concurrent stream
– More……surprises!

One of the most-requested additions to DirecTV Now is a cloud-based DVR for recording and storing shows to watch later, and AT&T originally stated that the DVR would be launching in fall 2017. The DVR has been in beta for weeks now, so it appears that AT&T is still fine-tuning the experience ahead of the wide launch next year. It’s not clear if all of the new features will debut at once, but besides the DVR subscribers can expect an overhauled user interface, 4K video, expanded on demand options, and more.

Tags: AT&T, DirecTV Now
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