AT&T's DirecTV Now Plagued With Outages and Sports Blackouts (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Barely two weeks after ATT launched DirecTV Now, the online streaming service's customers have already been hit by multiple outages, unexpected blackouts of live local sports games, and missing channels. There was an outage of about three hours last night and a two-hour outage Friday night, TVPredictions reported today. "DirecTV Now's customers said they couldn't log onto the streaming service, or they were suddenly met with a blank screen if already watching," the report said. The "Error Message 30" article tells customers that they may be suffering from "an intermittent or weak Internet connection," but in this case the problem was on DirecTV's end. "Tuesday evening we experienced an issue that prevented some customers from streaming on DirecTV Now," ATT told Ars today. "The issue has since been resolved and we're seeing normal streaming levels at this time. We thank our customers for their patience." Even when DirecTV Now works, availability of live sports games hasn't lived up to what the company promised. There appear to be technical problems affecting local games, but licensing restrictions may be limiting availability as well. This past Sunday, some DirecTV Now subscribers in cities such as San Francisco, Tampa Bay, and Atlanta could not watch NFL games on local Fox channels due to a technical problem, TVPredictions reported in another article.

Comments

Could not see local NFL Games?

[stedlj]

It seems few people remember that antennas still work! You do not even need a special digital..... that antenna that has been on the roof for 20+ years will work just fine. Heck I watch the games with the antenna because of the better picture.

Re:Could not see local NFL Games?

[Dan East]

Blackouts can occur in the city of a home game if not enough tickets were sold. Often the broadcasting rights are only granted if some minimum amount of seats have been sold. That is to keep the broadcasting of the games from hurting ticket sales. Depending on how many more tickets must be sold in order to allow the game to be broadcast, the network doing the broadcasting will sometimes buy tickets to make up the difference - as long as they still will see a net profit at the end of the bargain.

This mainly affects regions with teams that are doing poorly (I remember blackouts occurring when I was a kid for Cleveland Browns games - not much has changed since then huh?). It was always insulting knowing people in other regions could watch our team play but the local fans could not because enough tickets weren't sold.

Re: Could not see local NFL Games?

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, you know how your TV has (most likely) four holes on the back into which screws can go, in, again, most likely, a rectangular pattern? It should also have a sort of fat screw sticking out of the back, about a centimeter (or about 3/8 of an inch if you prefer,) and slightly longer than it is wide, with a hole in the center, running probably at right-angles to the screen, (unless it's on the side or bottom, as they occasionally are).
That screw is called a cable-jack or antenna or "aerial" jack or connector, depending upon where you are in the world.

Unless your "TV" is actually merely a monitor and not truly a TELEVISION SET, it should have built-into it a device called an RF-demodulator, which performs several important functions, and on modern TVs is the largest component soldered onto the board, typically being a silvery box several centemeters in any direction, usually enclosed by what will look like, if you can see it, a load of tiny finger-like projections all around the outside, (to reduce or eliminate RF interference).

You don't need to open the TV to see if you have one of these, usually if you have the jack, you have the module, and if you have the functionality you have the module. More on this later.

The module takes a very weak radio-frequency energy signal, on the order of a few microwatts to as little as a few nanowatts or even femptowatts, filters the signal to remove anything outside the desired frequency band, then quietly, in an electronic sense, meaning while injecting very little in the way of stray noise into the signal, boosts it thousands to millions of times it's original strength, to in the vicinity of maybe a few microwatts to a few milliwatts, (and any who know please forgive any minor erroneous info, I'm doing this exclusively from memory,) in any case, enough power to feed into a frequency mixing device that down-converts the radio-frequency signal into an intermediate frequency and then to a baseband one, or directly straight to baseband, low enough for the next step in any case, which is the stripping off of the audio signal, which is in turn sent to an audio amplifier, while the bulk of the rest goes to a video demodulating system.

The process is slightly different in modern, ATSC digital broadcasts in the US today, and in most of the rest of the world though not everywhere as far as I know. The underlying principles are the same up to this point; if the signal is digital, after it is pulled off the RF carrier, it is sent to some microchips where software is used to decode a program that is basically streamed, much as you might over the internet but in real time, and not on-demand to a single user but simplex-style to a variety of receivers in a sometimes wide area. This is known, whether analog or digital as a "broadcast."

To get this thus-named broadcast onto your screen, the sender takes the video and audio, or the equivalent data stream, modulates it onto the RF carrier wave, amplifies that to on the order of many thousands or millions of watts, and warms a piece of metal on the roof or atop a nearby tower with that energy which causes it to emit a characteristic invisible kind of light we call "radio," (due to oscillations of electrons going into and out of the antenna,) which because of its comparatively low frequency or long wavelength with respect to visible light, weakly interacts with most substances, including you, trees, the walls of your home, etc., which is how it performs the miracle of traversing the distance between the Television "Station" where the broadcast emanates from, (or occasionally a retransmitting station called a transponder or if it alters the frequency to avoid interfering with a local or different station authorized to transmit in that coverage area by (in the US,) an agency called the FCC, a translator,) penetrating your enclosed place where your TV is, to reach the antenna where it stimulates the electrons in IT to oscillate at the same original frequency, which then as I've already explained is amplified by... pr

Sucks Playstation Vue couldn't keep Viacom

[Anonymous Coward]

Out of the 3 current big services -- Dish Sling TV, Playstation Vue, DirecTV Now -- I feel Playstation Vue was the most feature complete at the best price. Losing the Viacom channels sort of cut off the best price option, as did the intro pricing on the $60 plan from DirecTV Now.

Dish Sling, at the time I tested, only allow streaming to one device at a time. They later came out with an option to do two devices, but that was at an additional cost. The UI wasn't bad, and feature set was about what you'd expect to see from a "TV service" with some sort of DVR capability.

Playstation Vue absolutely was the best value for my house. With 2 kids and 3 TVs, the service allows streaming on up to 5 devices simultaneously for no extra fee. Even the cheapest package option has what I'd consider some of the better channels vs what you'd find in say a base package from Comcast, Dish, or DirecTV. It also has a DVR and OnDemand features, although depending on the channel and if you use the DVR or OnDemand option, you may not be able to FF/RW. Overall I think it has one of the better UIs

DirecTV Now has a long way to go. The UI is cludgy and seems to put more focus on the OnDemand stuff rather than Live content. You can't "DVR" anything (yet?), and while you can *pause* a live feed, you can't then fast foward nor can you rewind. The streaming issues I understand as Vue and Sling both had issues early on, but the whole lack of features and honestly one not close to polished UI (at least on the fire stick/tv) is a huge 'ugh'. I believe you can also only stream on two devices at one time, so maybe not a great option for a larger family that watches TV around the same time, although the $35 for 100+ channels if you sign up during the promo and keep service is worth it.

Overall, I still think Playstation Vue has the best UI and bang for the buck when you factor in the channels, price, 5 device streaming, etc. Odd how I read Sling has 500,000+ subscribers while Vue has 100,000.. I wonder if the name plays into that more than anything