While it is not uncommon for streaming services to encounter outages during the year, Vidgo not only encountered one of the worst outages of 2023, but arguably one of the worst in the age of streaming. This makes Vidgo an easy choice for out Streaming Worse 2023 award for worst outage.
Not only is the outage still officially in effect, but it currently doesn’t look like it will be resolved before 2023 comes to an end either. Unless there is some form of a resolution in the next few days, this will become a 2024 outage as well.
To put the scope of this outage into full perspective, customers first started losing access to their live TV service at the beginning of October. With the service having largely remained inaccessible since then, Vidgo subscribers have spent the entirety of the fourth quarter without access to the live TV service … the live TV service they are still paying for each month.
A look back at Vidgo’s 2023 outage
When the outage first came to light, it was expected to be a short-term issue. After customers started reporting problems on the Friday night (Sept. 29), Vidgo issued a statement (Oct. 1) confirming a ‘technical outage’ and stating that the expectation was for “services to be restored Monday.”
That didn’t happen. By October 11, Vidgo started emailing customers to provide an update. While that update didn’t specify when service was expected to be restored, it did say it was making ‘solid progress’ on the issue, suggesting the problem would be fixed sooner rather than later.
As October continued, the updates became less frequent and, as far as we understand, things have remained relatively quiet throughout November and December, too. Even now, on the cusp of 2024, it still remains unclear when the problem will be resolved and subscribers will regain access to the service.
The importance of TV Everywhere
In spite of the Vidgo app and website having mostly been inaccessible during the outage, subscribers have been able to watch some of the channels included with their package by making use of TV Everywhere apps. While not as convenient as having all of the channels accessible through the same app and interface, TV Everywhere has proven significantly better than nothing on this occasion.
However, one of the major problems with this workaround is that Vidgo doesn’t offer TV Everywhere support for every channel included with its live TV packages. This is not something that’s exclusive to Vidgo either, as all of the main live TV services are typically missing support for some channels. In some cases, it is a support issue, while in others, it is simply a matter of those channels not offering TV Everywhere support to begin with.
Either way, this has meant that some Vidgo customers have been without any access to certain channels since the beginning of the outage.
Regardless of whether a subscriber has indirect access to all of their channels, we found it very difficult to find a worst outage in 2023, and barring some sudden development, it remains unclear when in 2024 subscribers will get their live TV service back.
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