Upset DirecTV Now customers denied refunds take their case to the FCC

AT&T’s streaming service DirecTV Now has had plenty of issues in its first few months, from not gaining rights to CBS to not showing local regional sports network games to blacking out NFL games to having major crashes and outages to regular login issues or unavailable channels for many of its users. However, the company doesn’t appear ready to offer refunds or credits to those dissatisfied with the service’s issues so far, and as TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez writes, that’s causing some upset customers to take their case to the Federal Communications Commission:

A number of consumers report they’re unable to get a refund for their subscription to AT&T’s recently launched streaming service, DirecTV Now – something they’ve requested after being unhappy with the new service’s performance. According to several postings on AT&T’s official forums, customers found the only way to get help was through a hard-to-find chat feature, and when they asked the AT&T reps about refunds, the customers were told they were not offered.

…One customer got so fed up, they filed a complaint with the FCC, which did provide them with a $25 refund after they explained that AT&T wasn’t offering refunds, credits or extensions of its service period, despite the service’s failure to properly function.

Many others have now done the same.

That forum thread now appears to be locked or inaccessible, but here are some of the tweets Perez includes of people saying they’re filing complaints, with some saying this has actually led to refunds for them:

https://twitter.com/mtthwbckmn/status/820428457762963458

https://twitter.com/Rick783/status/820339686480769025

https://twitter.com/Android_Sharing/status/820117178435260423

Some issues are perhaps to be expected with a new service, and it’s worth noting that even traditional cable or satellite providers do experience significant outages and don’t always offer refunds for them. People are also more likely to talk about bad experiences than good ones with television providers, so that should be kept in mind while evaluating DirecTV Now. However, the numbers of complaints about it are certainly significant, as are the numerous verifiable issues it’s experienced; they’ve gotten so bad that TVPredictions.com’s Phillip Swanni (who’s broken many of the DirecTV Now stories) has said he’s not sure their outages are even news anymore:

So, things aren’t going so well over at DirecTV Now, and plenty of their customers don’t seem to be happy. In addition to the issues with outages, login errors and more, many in Perez’s story reported issues with cancelling their free trial, being billed even after cancellation and more. A lot of them aren’t mincing their words, either, and they’re going in on DirecTV on social media:

Of course, DirecTV Now still has a reasonably impressive channel lineup, and it still has a fair number of users. Still, the current narrative about it isn’t a good one. We’ll see if they’re able to improve the service and change that conversation as time goes on, or if the criticisms will continue.

[TechCrunch]