DirecTV has just lost a customer

I’ve always had occasional reception problems with DirecTV, in this house, anyway. Their website claims that on rare occasions, extremely bad weather can cause very short losses of reception. My experience is that anything more than a light drizzle will knock out reception completely, often for hours.

Back at the end of July, I started seeing my video go blocky on all channels, with accompanying audio garbling. It’s the sort of thing you see when you lose sync in decoding a video file. My initial suspicion was that the antenna had become misaligned, and the receiver wasn’t getting a full data stream. I called their support line, and we went through various fixes for about an hour. I had to cut the call after an hour because I had to get to a class, but the last thing they recommended was doing a local reset of the receiver (they’d already done a remote reset). That apparently cleared things up for about a month, but it could have been coincidental, because the problem came back about a week ago.

It started with messages stating that the receiver was looking for a satellite signal, but that would go away after a few seconds, and nothing was affected, anyway. After a day or two of that, my video became blocky, with garbled audio, just as before. Tonight was the first time I had a long-enough block of time to call for support, because if your problem isn’t addressed by the FAQs on their website, you have to call them on the telephone.

After explaining the situation to the person who answered, I was told that I had to provide my cellphone number so that I could receive AT&T texts and other notifications. I didn’t realize that I had AT&T services, because I don’t, but they’ve apparently bought DirecTV, and you can’t get help without giving AT&T your cellphone number.

She did a remote reset of my receiver, which didn’t help, and I didn’t expect it to. While that was in process, she tried to upsell me on NFL Sunday Ticket and an $8/month warranty to save $50 if a service call needed to be made. I declined both. I like football, but I’ve been watching it less in recent years, and the last service call I required was when I had DirecTV installed when I moved here almost a decade ago. It’s also pretty tacky to try to sell me premium services when I’m asking for help because basic services aren’t working.

She then asked me to disconnect and reconnect all of the cables, which I had done back in July, and which had no effect. Next, she told me that I needed to get a technician from my television’s manufacturer to make a service call and determine what the television’s problem was. I told her that it was not a television problem, because shows that I’d recorded on the DVR prior to the problem’s recurrence could be watched without problem, the over-the-air antenna did not show the problem, and watching DVDs did not show the problem.

She reiterated that the required next step in troubleshooting was to have a technician from the manufacturer examine the television.

I hung up. I’ve been contemplating getting rid of DirecTV for a while, and the fact that I can expect neither reception nor service has tipped the balance for me. I’ll drop by the local office tomorrow after work and let them know – I’m not going to sign up for a new account on their website just to cancel service. Probably can’t do it online, anyway.

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