DirecTV NFL Game Mix

[SoCal Bong]

With another night game coming up, it's another opportunity for us fans with Sunday Ticket subscriptions to overdose on every game Sunday.

Redzone is great but I have some questions and suggestions regarding Game Mix (channel 702) which shows 8 mini screens during the early set and 4 for the late set.

Sometimes there are more than 8 1pm games so you can't see all of them on Game Mix. How are the included and excluded games determined? Based on the blacked out Chargers home games not being included, it seems that they vary it by TV market rather than everyone across the country getting the same 8.

I believe once in awhile there are only 7 games on at 1pm and they will put the Red Zone channel on the lower right "screen" but they don't do this when there are only 2 or 3 late games. Has anyone else noticed this inconsistency? The unused blocks will just keep the graphic "TEAM WINS!" up the whole time wasting that quadrant.

Now I know what you are thinking, if there are only 2 or 3 games on, why do you care that the Red Zone channel is not on in the unused quadrant? The reason is that blacked out games are included in RZ but not GM so if I did want to watch say Seattle, San Fran and San Diego (blacked out) at the same time, I'm not able to. If the RZ channel was on one of the unused quadrants I'd at least get a little bit of that blacked out game without changing channels. Even if there are no blacked out late games, I'd prefer the audio from the RZ channel anyway as they don't take commercial breaks and if you missed a big play, Andrew Siciliano will tell you and sometimes show you what happened.

Eight screens at once is overkill. I have a 63" TV and sometimes find myself focusing on one game (in a rather small screen) and eventually going to that channel or more likely RZ. What would be fantastic is if you could select 4 of the available games therefore allowing bigger pictures and just the games you are interested in. This might seem like a big deal technologically but you can already select which of the 8 games' audio you want which is sort of an intermediate step toward that and that has been available for at least a few seasons.

DirecTV has exclusive rights to the Sunday Ticket through the 2014-2015 season and I feel like if there were competition, they would be incentivized to provide more user control features.

 

[Gwedd]

Normally, the missing games from the mix are those carried on your local channel, so you'll have to tune to those in order to see them.

This happens all the time for me with Patriots games, since they are on either Fox or CBS, so I have that tuned in, and then flick down to the NFL Mix channel to see what else is going on.

Last Sunday was fun since the Patriots weren't playing so i was able to watch a lot of the (darned miserable no account) JEST game and also flick back to the NFL Mix channel all day long.

 

[mgcolby]

With another night game coming up, it's another opportunity for us fans with Sunday Ticket subscriptions to overdose on every game Sunday.

Redzone is great but I have some questions and suggestions regarding Game Mix (channel 702) which shows 8 mini screens during the early set and 4 for the late set.

Sometimes there are more than 8 1pm games so you can't see all of them on Game Mix. How are the included and excluded games determined? Based on the blacked out Chargers home games not being included, it seems that they vary it by TV market rather than everyone across the country getting the same 8.

I believe once in awhile there are only 7 games on at 1pm and they will put the Red Zone channel on the lower right "screen" but they don't do this when there are only 2 or 3 late games. Has anyone else noticed this inconsistency? The unused blocks will just keep the graphic "TEAM WINS!" up the whole time wasting that quadrant.

Now I know what you are thinking, if there are only 2 or 3 games on, why do you care that the Red Zone channel is not on in the unused quadrant? The reason is that blacked out games are included in RZ but not GM so if I did want to watch say Seattle, San Fran and San Diego (blacked out) at the same time, I'm not able to. If the RZ channel was on one of the unused quadrants I'd at least get a little bit of that blacked out game without changing channels. Even if there are no blacked out late games, I'd prefer the audio from the RZ channel anyway as they don't take commercial breaks and if you missed a big play, Andrew Siciliano will tell you and sometimes show you what happened.

Eight screens at once is overkill. I have a 63" TV and sometimes find myself focusing on one game (in a rather small screen) and eventually going to that channel or more likely RZ. What would be fantastic is if you could select 4 of the available games therefore allowing bigger pictures and just the games you are interested in. This might seem like a big deal technologically but you can already select which of the 8 games' audio you want which is sort of an intermediate step toward that and that has been available for at least a few seasons.

DirecTV has exclusive rights to the Sunday Ticket through the 2014-2015 season and I feel like if there were competition, they would be incentivized to provide more user control features.

Games are only blacked out on ST if A. You live in that market and the game is blacked out locally. B. if the game is on your local broadcast.

Easy solution: just do what I did and put 6 tv's in the room. I usually just nix the two ****ty games.

I do agree that it would be better for us if Directv didn't have the monopoly on ST. The price is getting ridiculous. They can do all the gimmicks they want but in the end you either pay the "reduced" price and lose features that were included in the past or pay the full fee which increased from the previous season to get some or all of the features you want i.e. HD up until this year, or mobile etc....