Get to know the DIRECTV Extras menu

Yes, it’s pretty tempting to ignore. The Extras menu on your HD receiver or DVR doesn’t get a lot of love, and that’s a shame. It’s become somewhat of a graveyard of old ideas, but each one of those ideas was really revolutionary at one point and if it weren’t for smartphones, they might still be. Let’s take a look at this menu that you probably haven’t visited in a while.

Messages
Yeah this is the same messages menu you get in the info screen. There’s useful stuff there, like free previews and upcoming events.

Active
Oh, the old Active menu. Once the height of interactive television, you could get an idea of what other people were watching, get the time and weather, and a few other things depending on what was going on in the world of entertainment. Active comes from the days of SD receivers and it hasn’t gotten a lot of love in about 8 years. At some point it will go away and no one will notice.

TVApps
DIRECTV’s TVApps menu is pretty good… you can get much better weather info than the Active menu, plus special interactive experiences for sporting events and the always-cool scoreguide. Just not sure what it’s doing here.

LifeSHIELD
For most people this is a slide telling you about DIRECTV’s security service. I hold out hope that one day it will be more than that.

Showroom
This should be pretty cool, because you could get previews of coming attractions and other informative stuff. Unfortunately there isn’t a lot of content there.

Pandora
Used to be cool but everyone I know has moved over to Spotify.

Don’t get me wrong, folks, I don’t mean to be mean. The stuff in the Extras menu is still there because someone in the DIRECTV universe still thinks it has value, and I think that’s great. These things don’t slow your receiver down or take up space that you would need for something else, so it’s great that they are there and someone uses them. But let me ask all of you… do you remember the last time you did?

About the Author

Stuart Sweet
Stuart Sweet is the editor-in-chief of The Solid Signal Blog and a "master plumber" at Signal Group, LLC. He is the author of over 10,000 articles and longform tutorials including many posted here. Reach him by clicking on "Contact the Editor" at the bottom of this page.