DIRECTV SD Viewers Miss Red Sox-A's Game
The satcaster apparently suffered an early morning transponder problem.
By Swanni
But the rest of DIRECTV customers -- those who do not own an HDTV and/or subscribe to the satcaster's HD package -- were shut out apparently because of a faulty transponder that blacked out the game on the two networks' analog channels.
The outage generated scores of complaints from baseball fans on Internet message boards, particularly since they rose early to watch the game at its unusual starting time of 6 a.m. ET.
The early start time was caused by Major League Baseball's decision to hold the opening game in Tokyo.
DIRECTV has yet to respond to an inquiry from TVPredictions.com as to why the two analog channels failed. However, the Associated Press reports that the satcaster refused to say why it happened.
Update: DIRECTV released this statement this afternoon:
"We experienced temporary technical difficulties early this morning which resulted in some channels not being available to customers (the majority of our channels were not affected). We have since corrected the problem.
In the case of the Red Sox game, any customers who have NESN or ESPN2 in HD were able to see the entire game. For customers who watch NESN in Standard Definition (SD), we were able to bring the channel back at the top of the seventh inning. For customers who watch ESPN2 in SD the channel came back on later, after the game was over.
We deeply apologize, particularly to Red Sox and A's fans, for any inconvenience this may have caused.
For those who missed it, ESPN2 will replay the game today beginning at 2 PM ET. NESN is replaying the game today beginning at 2:30 PM ET."
DIRECTV customer service reps this morning told customers that the problem was caused by a faulty transponder.
The analog channels have since returned to the air.
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