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AT&T Inc. customers may be fishing their TV remotes out of their pockets instead of the cushions of their couch.

The San Antonio-based telecommunications giant said Tuesday that subscribers to its Homezone video service now can control their digital video recorders through their Web-enabled cell phones. Subscribers are able to remotely schedule or erase recordings from their set-top boxes via their cell keypad.

"As time goes by, we'll be expanding what our customers can do remotely with a cell phone," spokeswoman Amanda Ray said. "We anticipate introducing additional features."

Homezone is AT&T's $10-a-month service that lets subscribers to EchoStar's Dish Network TV call up on-demand movies and share music and video files with their home computers. The company has a multiyear marketing agreement with Dish.

AT&T also said Tuesday that it has made movies, concerts and other video content from download service Akimbo available to Homezone subscribers. That brings its total number of downloadable titles available to those customers to 7,000.

Video has become an essential product offering for AT&T as it faces competition from cable companies such as Time Warner. Cable carriers are whittling away its revenues by offering phone service over their fiber-optic networks.

The company also offers video via U-verse, a cable-like service it's rolling out over its broadband Internet lines in markets including San Antonio. The company began offering U-verse in the Dallas-Fort Worth area this week, bringing its total number of markets to 14.

But analysts said AT&T must try to differentiate its TV service from that of cable companies by blending video, broadband and phone technologies.

The latest Homezone feature, they add, is a step in that direction.

"This is what AT&T needs to do in order to compete against the cable television world," said Jeff Kagan, an Atlanta-based telecom analyst. "Cable television had a head start offering bundles of telephone and television, but going forward, the phone companies are raising the game to a new level with the innovation of their new products."

AT&T offers Homezone across the 13 states that made up its service area before it bought BellSouth Corp. last year. Customers in the former BellSouth region cannot yet get Homezone.