Floyd Mayweather vs Conor McGregor News: Delayed Broadcast of Fight Enrages PPV Subscribers
The broadcast of Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor's fight at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada last Saturday was delayed, which caused pay-per-view (PPV) subscribers to complain all over hotlines and social media platforms.
Several streaming services for the Mayweather–McGregor fight experienced technical difficulties due to the high demand of subscribers. One of them, UFC Fight Pass, addressed the issue on Twitter.
"Due to overwhelming traffic you may be experiencing log in issues. This will be resolved shortly," their post read. However, the delayed took a lot longer and viewers who were anticipating the match could not wait any longer.
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Some of them started posting images of the broken down streaming service, while others started outing the service provider because of the lousy customer service aside from not getting their money's worth.
As it turns out, the technical difficulties weren't only in streaming services. There were also some issues with the cable broadcast of the fight.
According to Stephen Espinoza, executive vice president and general manager of Showtime Sports, the whole country was affected.
Sal Paolantonio of ESPN confirmed that there were "scattered outages" all over the country. To address this, cable systems were allowed to reboot to fix the connection so that people could finally watch the fight.
As a result of the technical difficulties, Showtime delayed the fight so that streaming services and cable PPV providers could catch up, CBS Sports confirmed.
However, the delay took longer than expected. Viewers complained from delays of 40 minutes up to two hours.
ESPN's Darren Rovell said that what happened could lead to a big suit involving the PPV providers.
"There's already money loss. There's already a potential for a lawsuit," he said, adding that the only defense these streaming providers have is that they gave their viewers the main event.
But there were some viewers who still didn't get their money's worth when the fight did start streaming. Boxing fan Zack Bartel from Portland, Oregon has filed a lawsuit against Showtime for unlawful trade practice and unjust enrichment, The Hollywood Reporter confirmed.
Bartel paid to see a high-definition quality live stream through the Showtime app, but only experienced "grainy video, error screens, buffer events, and stalls."
