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.