Talk about missed reception.
An undisclosed number of DirecTV subscribers in the Pittsburgh area missed the end of the Super Bowl Sunday night, prompting customer complaints and angry social media posts while both the satellite provider and local Fox 53 Pittsburgh placed the blame on each other.
A statement on the Fox 53 Facebook and home page included this: “On the Fox 53 end, our over-the-air, cable, FiOS and Dish Network signals were at 100% — which leads us to believe the problem was on the DirecTV show end.”
AT&T owns DirecTV and a press statement from Brandy Bell-Truskey of AT&T global media relations noted, “We were disappointed for our DirecTV customers that the issue arose with Fox Pittsburgh’s production link at a most inopportune time.”
The company issued a more strongly worded statement later Monday evening, declaring in part “ The outage was due to a failure of equipment managed by Fox 53.... the signal was restored only after the engineers at Fox 53 reset the equipment at their facility.”
Problems began Sunday at 10:14 p.m., just as the New England Patriots were making a historic comeback. The trouble was not resolved until after New England’s 34-28 overtime victory against Atlanta.
According to Jim Lapiana, Fox 53 general manager, this was not the first time there have been problems with a DirecTV dropped signal.
Maria Sciullo: msciullo@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1478 or @MariaSciulloPG.
First Published: February 7, 2017, 5:00 a.m.
