If your Red Zone channel on DIRECTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket isn’t on today, you are not alone.
Shortly after today’s 1 p.m. kickoff, hundreds of subscribers of DIRECTV’s satellite edition of the Ticket began posting complaints on social media sites saying the channel was unavailable. And customers say it’s still unavailable as of 2:34 p.m. ET today.
However, there could be an explanation. The Red Zone channel is only available to subscribers of DIRECTV’s more expensive ‘Max’ edition of the Sunday Ticket, not the basic Ticket plan. It’s possible that some customers are complaining they don’t have the Red Zone channel because they don’t realize it’s not in their plan. That actually happened last year, as I noted in this September 18, 2016 tweet.)
(They wouldn’t notice the absence of the Red Zone channel on their satellite systems until now, week two of the season, because the first week of games and the Red Zone was available to everyone as a free preview.
(If you’re not familiar with the Red Zone channel, it offers live views of games when one team is inside its opponent’s 20-yard-line.)
Update: Since publication of this article, some DIRECTV Ticket ‘Max’ customers have told me they have the Red Zone channel while others say they don’t. So the next paragraph hopefully will provide a final answer here.
The TVAnswerMan.com has asked AT&T, which owns DIRECTV, for a comment on the complaints and will report back here if we receive one.
Update: AT&T has acknowledged that some customers are not getting the Red Zone and Fantasy channels. Here is the company’s statement:
“We are aware of a service issue affecting some DIRECTV customers with FANTASY ZONE™ and RED ZONE CHANNEL®. We’re working to resolve it as quickly as possible. We thank our customers for their patience.”
DIRECTV’s Twitter customer service team today has asked most complaining subscribers to send it a private ‘direct message’ with details of their issues.
“We’d like to help – please DM us with more info so we can investigate,” @DIRECTVService tweeted.
However, @DIRECTVService has acknowledged to at least one customer that there’s a “issue” affecting the Red Zone channel.
“There’s some issues that we are working to resolve as quickly as possible,” the customer service team told @JamesC0017 at 2:34 p.m. ET.
In addition to the Red Zone issue, some customers say they’ve had trouble logging into the Sunday Ticket live stream which is available to all subscribers to the satellite package of NFL Sunday games.
— Phillip Swann
