Last week AT&T missed its goal to release a Roku channel for DIRECTV NOW. I know many of our readers are upset about that, but it may be a good thing for cord cutting overall.
When AT&T first released DIRECTV NOW it was a rushed product “not ready for primetime.” It had many early issues and earned a well-deserved bad reputation.
Not only did it hurt DIRECTV NOW but it also damaged cord cutting. Roughly 200,000 Americans signed up for DIRECTV NOW in the first few months after it launched. Many of them were new cord cutters testing out a new streaming service for the first time.
What happened was many of them left with a bad taste in their months. I heard from more than one saying they are going back to cable because of the issues they had. So not only did AT&T get a bad name from its poorly launched DIRECTV NOW, but cord cutting also got a bad name from the launch.
Hopefully AT&T and others learned from the DIRECTV NOW mistake. Hopefully they—the current flood of new services coming on the market from Google, Hulu, and YouTube along with Comcast and Verizon—all take the time to get it right. With soon to be 10 live TV streaming services on the market if you don’t get it right you won’t last long.
I really do hope that AT&T takes the time to get DIRECTV NOW for the Roku right. When services release poor products it hurts cord cutting as a whole. Hopefully others will also have learn from that mistake.
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