Please excuse my ignorant question.....I am in the beginning stages of looking to rid Direct TV. I too like the option of DVRing. When you record something from YouTubeTV, where is it saved? To your account I assume?
Well, the "DVR" features are all located on the YouTubeTV ("YTTV") servers, unlike your DirecTV ("DTV") receiver where it's being stored on a physical spinning hard disk inside your receiver in your house.
Consider the fact that YTTV is streaming everything exactly when you ask for it, unlike DTV who pushes everything to the satellite once, in real time. DirecTV cannot afford to push stuff to you twice - which means the DVR storage must be on your receiver. If you want a DTV recording, you have to save what they stream when they stream it.
But YTTV streams everything only when you ask for it. And it's already all on their servers ready for access. So their system is implicitly 100% "on demand." Therefore it costs nothing for them to keep a list of stuff you want to watch later, plus a pointer to how many minutes into the show you were last watching it. The only thing they have to do is store those recordings of everything they broadcast for however many months (9, I guess) so anyone can request it again later. And of course they also created an easy interface to your "library," which is nothing more than a list of pointers to the info.
So while a DTV "List" and the YTTV "Library" look roughly the same when you're browsing your DVR contents, they really do work very differently.
Note also that you can watch the contents of your YTTV library literally ANYWHERE - your iPad or phone or laptop or desktop or Roku or FireStick or AppleTV... because they all just show streamed content, and YTTV is happy to push it to whatever device(s) are logged into your account. Super convenient. I can start watching a show on my TV, then finish it on my phone or tablet in another room... it really means that the "television" is just another screen that does the same thing as any of your other devices. You're totally liberated from that one TV in the family room.
Note that DirecTV Now (or AT&T TV Now or whatever they're calling it this month) is very similar to YTTV. Just more expensive and still tied to the AT&T monster.
It does make me wonder why they don't offer the ability to request ANY show from the last 9 months, even if you didn't flag it to record. What if I want to go back and watch some local channel from a few days ago, but I didn't DVR it at the time? Shouldn't matter to YTTV; it's already on their server. I guess they just don't want to complicate the interface and confuse people.
