DirecTV Now, AT&T’s new OTT-TV service, appears to be having a bumpy first night as customers headed to Twitter to lodge complaints about log-in troubles and the receiving of error codes.
DirecTV Now, a service the company is targeting to what it views as 20 million U.S. homes that aren’t in the pay TV ecosystem, such as cord-cutters and cord-nevers, launched Wednesday morning.
RELATED: DirecTV Now to Launch on November 30
DownDetector’s monitoring of DirecTV showed a spike in reported issues earlier in the evening, but later appeared to be simmering down, though it’s not clear if DownDetector is monitoring only the DirecTV satellite TV service or the DirecTV Now service as well. At last check, the most reported problems with DirecTV were No signal (60%), online viewing (23%) and the Website (15%).
The DirecTV Now Help Twitter handle acknowledged earlier in the evening that the service was experiencing technical issues and that it was receiving a high volume of outreach from users who were seeking responses from service agents:
@Richpeterson398 We apologize for the inconvenience! We are working diligently to have all issues fixed. Thanks! ^DiaK
— DIRECTV NOW Help (@DIRECTVNowHelp) December 1, 2016
@RoaringRam2014 We appreciate your understanding, Darren. We are doing our best o restore your services. Thank you for your patience. ^CrisH
— DIRECTV NOW Help (@DIRECTVNowHelp) December 1, 2016
@biggiechubbbs Our sincerest apologies as we are experiencing an extremely high volume. What's going on? DM us! ^EdwardJ
— DIRECTV NOW Help (@DIRECTVNowHelp) December 1, 2016
Some users, including Phillip Swan of TV Predictions, said they were getting false messages that their accounts had reached their maximum number of streams (DirecTV Now allows up to two concurrent streams per account):
@directvnow Service seems great so far...apart from it continually telling me (and others per Reddit) I'm at my stream limit w/1 running.
— Jay Kosier (@Maluhaka) December 1, 2016
I just got the multiple stream error message on my DIRECTV Now app.
— Swanni (@SwanniOnTV) December 1, 2016
Dan Rayburn, EVP of StreamingMedia.com and principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan, held that it’s critical that the service get out of the gate without too many hitches:
If AT&T can't get these DirecTV Now sign up errors fixed, it's going to kill the service from the start. "error messages". pic.twitter.com/uTYOvrdPpF
— Dan Rayburn (@DanRayburn) December 1, 2016
The cover story of the Dec. 5 edition of Multichannel News takes aim at the live OTT-TV trend and the tech and business challenges faced as those live streaming services will need to figure out how to handle highly-viewed tent-pole events and continue to scale up as their audiences expand.
