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DirecTV Now plagued by launch week errors

DirecTV Now plagued by launch week errors

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James Bareham / The Verge

DirecTV Now got off to a rocky start this week, with many customers experiencing errors that made it difficult or impossible to use the newly launched internet TV service.

Customers have been tweeting at DirecTV’s support account over the past two days about errors preventing them from logging in, watching the entirety of shows, or playing anything at all.

Subscribers are still reporting errors this morning

One common error blocks playback when the service incorrectly believes that a user has too many streams open at once. Another error would black out channels that subscribers were supposed to receive. And some subscribers said playback would stop several minutes into a TV show, before skipping ahead to the next episode.

DirecTV acknowledged on Twitter that subscribers were having trouble logging in, later saying the issue had been resolved Thursday morning. And a representative of AT&T, which owns DirecTV Now, told Variety that the streaming problems should be resolved as well. “We experienced an issue [Wednesday] night that prevented some customers from streaming,” AT&T said. “Engineers resolved the issue, and we haven’t experienced it since.”

Complaints over Twitter do appear to have slowed down, but they haven’t altogether stopped. One person said last night that they were getting video errors “left and right.” And others are still reporting streaming issues and missing channels. “Day 3 and I am still getting Error 40 on many things I try to watch,” another person tweeted, referring to an error that prevented videos from playing. They added, “Service not ready for market obviously.”

These issues didn’t pop up during our short first look at DirecTV Now — it seemed like a strong start, albeit one missing some core features and channels. But that demo occurred before the service opened its doors to the public, at a time when there was much less stress on DirecTV’s systems. From the sound of it, AT&T still has some work to do before the system works as it’s supposed to.