AT&T Admits It Wasn’t Prepared For DirecTV Now To Grow So Quickly

Although AT&T executives initially dismissed technical issues that popped up during the early days of DirecTV Now as no big deal, the company’s top tech executive admits now that the company wasn’t prepared to deal with the streaming service’s rapid growth.

In January, AT&T said 200,000 people had signed up for DirecTV Now in its first month, which is great — if your service is actually ready for such an avalanche.

At the time, AT&T Entertainment Group CTO Enrique Rodriguez said that despite the various technical issues that many users experienced early on, everything had gone rather smoothly, reports Fierce Cable.

“Absolutely there were problems … the problems were not as big as I expected,” he said. “I’m so proud of the quality we delivered.”

But speaking last week at Jeffries 2017 Technology Conference in Miami, AT&T’s president of technology and operations Bill Hogg confessed that the sudden growth was a lot to handle.

“It ramped up a lot faster than we ever thought it would, which is a great thing but also caught us a bit flat-footed on a couple things,” Hogg said.

To that end, some users say they’re still dealing with sports blackouts and a glitchy DirecTV Now app, TVAnswerman.com noted this week.

Hogg said last week that the company’s engineering teams have been working through authentication issues and streaming issues.

“What we’re seeing is the error rates are declining pretty fast and that the platform is stabilizing,” he claimed.

[h/t DSLReports.com]

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