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Mayweather-McGregor Streaming Glitches Prompt Lawsuit Against Showtime (hollywoodreporter.com)
Customers who paid $99.99 to watch the Conor McGregor-Floyd Mayweather fight are suing Showtime due to the quality of their stream and buffering issues. From a report via Hollywood Reporter: Portland, Ore., boxing fan Zack Bartel paid to stream the fight in high-definition through the Showtime app but says all he saw was "grainy video, error screens, buffer events, and stalls." Bartel is suing Showtime for unlawful trade practices and unjust enrichment, alleging the network rushed its pay-per-view streaming service to the market without securing the bandwidth necessary to support the scores of cable-cutting fans. The complaint, which is largely composed of screenshots and tweets, is seeking for each member of the class actual damages or $200 in statutory damages, whichever is greater. The proposed class includes Oregon consumers who viewed Showtime's app advertisement on iTunes and paid $99.99 to stream the fight, but were unable to view the fight live on the app "in HD at 1080p resolution and at 60 frames per second, and who experienced ongoing grainy video, error screens, buffer events, and stalls instead." Showtime senior vp sports communications director, Chris DeBlasio, says: "We have received a very limited number of complaints and will issue a full refund for any customer who purchased the event directly from Showtime and were unable to receive the telecast." DeBlasio recommends users contact their cable or satellite provider if they experienced any issues.
He can't prove the problems were caused by Showtime. Most likely they were caused by his internet provider.
Unlikely to the extreme: these problems were reported so widely, Showtime even moved the main event to mitigate the problems caused by the unresponsive servers.
If he actually goes ahead with the suit, he's likely to be counter sued; and he'll probably lose.
Countersued? For what? At this point I think you must be trolling.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Imagine if there was no illegal streaming, those pesky pirates would have been forced to stream from the original source putting even more strain on the system. In a way, piracy may have saved the day.
What ever happened to multicast streaming? I thought there was a big push for that a decade or so ago so one stream could service thousands of endpoints simultaneously in order to alleviate disasters like this.