Premiership Football Finals Knock Sky’s Broadband NOW TV Service Offline

Customers who shelled out £9.99 for a Sky Sports Day Pass on Sky’s broadband-based Internet video streaming service NOW TV have been promised a refund after another spate of network congestion took the service offline just as the final Barclays Premier League Football matches of the 2013/14 season were kicking off.

The expensive Day Pass gives NOW TV users 24 hours of access to every Sky Sports channel but those who coughed up the cash yesterday, largely in order to watch the final matches of the season (all of which kicked off at 3pm), were left fuming after their video streams suddenly stopped right at the start of the games and or returned the following error message: “Oops, something went wrong“.

The good news is that NOW TV has apologised for the problems, which were finally rectified after most of the games had ended, and they’ve also promised to deliver a refund to all those affected.

NOW TV Statement

The service is now back up and running. We’re really sorry for any interruptions to your viewing this afternoon.

We’ll be contacting all sports pass customers automatically to provide a refund or a replacement pass. You don’t need to do anything to make this happen.

However a 130 page long topic on the NOW TV Community forum suggests that this will do little to appease the services angry customers. As one of many Sky Sports Day Pass owners said, “Once again your servers have failed to deliver any service and all the people that paid £9,99 for the sports pass got nothing, “Now TV” may refund the £9,99 but you cannot refund the live game.”

The service has now been disrupted on several occasions via network congestion caused by high demand for popular shows, such as Game of Thrones (here), which have clogged up its servers. NOW TV has also faced complaints over the huge pile of missing TV shows on its £4.99 per month Entertainment Pass, which are often unavailable due to “Rights Restrictions” (here).

Meanwhile a recent plan to increase the price of its Entertainment Pass by around 40%, which is perhaps necessary in order to help Sky add more capacity so that it can deliver what customers expect, has recently been put on hold (here). No reason for the change was given but we wouldn’t be surprised if the above problems have something to do with it.

It’s a shame because otherwise NOW TV is an excellent solution for paid TV access but Sky clearly need more time to get it right.