My 1st Day With Sunday Ticket
The day finally came. September 7th, 2008. A little after 12:00, while waiting for a friend to arrive, I decided to test the Sunday Ticket I ordered through DirectTV back in April by tuning in to a pre-game show.
It didn’t work. I kept getting messages about a number to call to order The Ticket. I called the DirectTV customer support line and after going through the IVR for a while, was told to hold for about 9 minutes. 10 minutes later, I hear the phone begin to ring! I finally got through to a person. “Hello, hello.” Then the dreaded silence. Nothing. Nada.
I was pissed. After fumbling around for a while I found an alternate number for Direct TV and I dialed it. Then my cell phone indicated an inbound call from an area code I didn’t recognize. DirectTV had called me back! They had my account number and info in front of them and they were disconnected too. I was impressed that they called me back. I have never had that happen to me before anywhere.
They re-sent the code to both of my receiver boxes and I was in business. Now I needed to test the Superfan option to send the football games to my PC and laptop. I tried many times to get that to work but I kept getting web messages that my request timed out or that I had entered an incorrect password.
Superfan’s signal to your computer is called Supercast. It offers to either play one game in your web browser or it will allow you to download an Adobe application that you run to allow many more features and looks like the TV broadcast. Finally, at the same time my friend arrived, I got the Supercast with the Adobe application to launch on my PC!
I found out that DirectTV was hammered with requests for assistance and demand for bandwidth and satellite connections just as the games began. I noticed the response time when I changed a channel was slower than normal. The increase in traffic is what most likely took the Supercast so long to start running. My PC is running Windows XP Pro and my laptop, which was still having trouble runs Vista Home Edition. My PC connects with broadband cable and the laptop uses a Verizon USB 720 hi-speed card/modem.
The laptop finally logged in properly at 1:10. I was thrilled. So, with 2 TV’s and 1 laptop plugged into the Sunday Ticket, we were going crazy checking everything out.
We had the ability to watch 8 games at the same time, selecting one for audio. They have a Red Zone channel which automatically switches when a team is about to score. They have channels with stats. Individual channels with local feeds to single games. The high-definition picture was great and the audio feed was excellent also.
The Supercast provided a very good video stream. It didn’t have many pauses that you normally see when you watch a game live using a PC.
Overall, I was very happy with the package. I was able to get the additional Superfan package for free because it was my 1st time ordering the Sunday Ticket. I felt that after having so much fun yesterday with all the features, if I had to pay for the upgrade to Superfan, it would be money well spent!
If you have any questions, I’ll try to answer.