Armed with a bowl of chili and two remotes, I sat down in front of my giant TV to enjoy NFL Sunday Ticket for the first time ever.  Sunday Ticket was a luxury not afforded to me before now because I’m not a Direct TV customer.  However, Direct TV has partnered with Sony to provide Sunday Ticket to PS3 users via a streaming option similar to the excellent MLB.TV service (reviewed here a few months back).

Unfortunately, those of us who shelled out a few hundred dollars to pay the exorbitant fee for the service were treated to myriad video artifacts, streams that didn’t work all, and a non-chronological(!) presentation of many of the games.  In short, a disaster.

Those of us who use streaming options for services like MLB.TV or Netflix come to expect some modest level of “computer-y” distortion of video.  That comes with the territory.  But what happened today with Sunday Ticket goes far above and beyond those sorts of minor issues.  This is a setup that either didn’t have the bandwidth to accommodate the level of viewership that should have been expected, or had faulty software (released only two days before the season began).

I’m neither a Direct TV employee nor a software expert, so I can’t say which it is.  Direct TV’s Twitter accounts have already acknowledged the massive problems.

I had planned on providing a full review of Sunday Ticket as I did for MLB.TV, but the service is so terribly flawed and non-functional that there’s no point.  Until these issues get resolved, don’t even think about purchasing this.  That goes without saying.

What I can do is provide a video as an example of what the service looked like today: