AT&T’s streaming service is off to a rough start. After the initial launch giddiness, the service has had major service problems including crashing apps, apps not loading, the wrong channels being shown in regions, and the much-vaunted 72-hour rewind service not functioning at all.
To top things off, an
As you’d expect, AT&T’s customer service is dealing with this super well.
The way to see for yourself how badly AT&T’s train has derailed is the DirecTV Now Twitter support account. In between tweeting out happy ads for the service, it has been trying valiantly to respond to thousands of customer complaints:
is that a joke? "Have I tried turning it off, and then back on again". Funny. Yes. Yes, of course I have.
— josh woodby (@sublimejosh2000) January 13, 2017
https://twitter.com/DIRECTVNowHelp/status/819956479772004352
That’s a tiny sampling from recent tweets, but the problems appear to be bad. The DirecTV Now support account has only been around for a few months, but it’s already amassed 15,000 tweets. Assuming that the vast majority of those are in response to complaints, that’s a lot of unhappy customers.
The Verge also reports that online chat support is swamped, with some users sending in screenshots of waiting over half an hour to chat with a support rep.
In the meantime, AT&T’s execs appear to be rearranging deck chairs. Rather than acknowledge serious flaws in its much-hyped brand-new streaming service, AT&T Entertainment CTO Enrique Rodriguez said in an interview that “the problems were not as big as I expected,” and that “I’m so proud of the quality we delivered.”
Hopefully for AT&T, executives will wake up and smell disaster, otherwise DirecTV Now might not have many subscribers in a year’s time. Then, we’d all have to go back to paying monthly for a cable TV bundle, renting a set-top box from our cable company for an outrageous price. Wouldn’t AT&T just hate that!
