TV Answer Man, I couldn’t watch the Sunday Ticket on the app last week and I saw online that DIRECTV will give us refunds for the mess up. Do you know when the refund will be given and how much will it be? — Joel, Los Angeles.
Joel, DIRECTV’s streaming edition of the NFL Sunday Ticket has been a nightmare for viewers for the first two weeks of the season with recurring technical issues such as login difficulties, error messages and buffering. The snafus have been so commonplace that the satcaster has had to commit to providing refunds to subscribers for both the first two weeks.
(DIRECTV’s Sunday Ticket satellite subscribers get free access to the streaming version as well; it’s also available to some non-DIRECTV subscribers as a separate subscription. It’s also important to note that satellite customers were not affected by the technical outages in weeks one and two, just those who used the streaming service.)
But when will the refunds be issued? And for how much?
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Some subscribers say they’ve already been told they will receive credits for the problems in week one, although the amount of the credit is unclear. If it’s for one week, as DIRECTV suggested in an e-mail sent to some customers after week one, then it would likely be around $20, the pro-rated amount for one week in an 18-week season. (The Sunday Ticket costs anywhere from $293 to $395, depending upon whether you get the basic or Max edition.)
However, some streaming users say they haven’t heard anything about the week two refund. So we asked DIRECTV about that today and here’s the response from a company spokesperson:
“We will begin to reach out to our customers who were unable to stream some of the games on Sunday to let them know we will automatically reimburse them for week two. We apologize to our customers for their experience and for the inconvenience.”
It sounds like another e-mail is coming soon, if it hasn’t already been sent. The DIRECTV spokesperson did not say how much each streaming user would get, but a reimbursement would likely again be around $20, the loss of one week of games.
Joel, hope that helps. Happy viewing and stay safe!
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— Phillip Swann
@tvanswerman