The big Mayweather – McGregor fight causes big problems for cable and streaming services
Floyd Mayweather beat Conor McGregor Saturday night in a fun to watch 10 round TKO in front of a packed T-Mobile Center in Las Vegas. But the big news might be the fact that many, yours included played for the fight but had plenty of trouble seeing it.
Major technical issues forced Showtime Pay-per-view television to delay the main event by over an hour but it did not keep over 4 million fans from paying $100 to watch the fight.
The main event was set to begin at 11:15 pm ET but it didn’t start until around 12:15 am ET early Sunday morning.
I streamed the fight and all of the of the undercard went off without a hitch but the main event between Mayweather and McGregor was a disaster. I saw none of the ten rounds without buffering issues and I was not the only one.
Technical issues plagued both the Showtime and the UFC, streams and it caused big problems on their websites, mobile platforms and OTT devices like Roku as well as Amazon Fire TV. Fans unsurprisingly began lashing out on social media about their inability to watch an event.
At one point it was second only to the hurricane coverage in Houston on Twitter.
The delay by Showtime PPV of the main event because of last minute buys coming from both cable and streaming services. Showtime issued a statement to the press on why they delayed the start of the fight by about an hour.
“Due to high demand, we have reports of scattered outages from various cable and satellite providers and the online offering. We will delay the start of the main event slightly to allow for systems to get on track. We do not expect a lengthy delay.”
Cable companies throughout the Bay Area and around the country had problems. There will no doubt be refunds but at the moment it is not expected to affect the fights bottom-line too much.
Despite the delay, fans stuck with the broadcast and it will reward Mayweather with a check around $300 million or 70 percent of the total cash haul, while McGregor will get 30 percent of the pot of gold.
According to today’s edition of Variety, the Mayweather-McGregor fight was expected to be among the biggest PPV draws in history, estimated to reap as much as $1 billion in revenues. But the total haul from the event could be impacted if refunds have to be delivered to a significant subset of the audience.
