Showtime To Offer Some Refunds For Mayweather-McGregor PPV Glitches Amid Lawsuit
UPDATED with refund offer, fight re-airing: An Oregon fight fan who ordered Saturday’s Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Conor McGregor fight has filed a class-action lawsuit against Showtime after he said his and many others’ livestreams failed during the bout, in which Mayweather TKO’d the upstart UFC champ in the 10th round.
Showtime declined comment on the suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Portland, OR, but said it would offer refunds to users who experienced problems seeing the mega-fight on the networke-owned Showtime PPV app. “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,” said Chris DeBlasio, Showtime Sports’ VP Communications.
The much-hyped fight cost $99.99 and certainly will be one of the top pay-per-view events in history. The plaintiff said he ordered the fight on the Showtime PPV app and streamed it via Apple TV. But, “Instead of being a ‘witness to history’ as defendant had promised, the only thing plaintiff witnessed was grainy video, error screens, buffer events, and stalls,” stated the lawsuit (read it here).
The suit claims unlawful trade practices and unjust enrichment and seeks a jury trial. The filing includes photos and screenshots of blurred video and buffering pages it says occurred during the fight The suit said the plaintiff tested his Internet speed to make sure it was not an issue on his end.
“At the same time defendant’s system was unable to stream the Mayweather fight in HD, plaintiff was able to watch other streaming services on YouTube and Netflix in crystal clear HD, as usual,” the suit said. Later, it added, “When plaintiff turned to Twitter, he saw hundreds of complaints being tweeted by defendant’s other app customers in real time during the Mayweather fight experiencing the same issue with defendant’s defective service.”
Discovery on the case is set to be completed by December 26, and a Joint Alternate Dispute Resolution Report is due by January 25, according to court documents.
Showtime said today that problems with those who ordered the fight through their cable or satellite service should contact those companies directly. Via back-end technology, Showtime is able to tell who actually saw the fight on their computer or other device, an insider tells Deadline
There were issues that materialized during Saturday’s big fight and the undercard, which began at 9 PM ET live from Las Vegas. The UFC’s streaming service UFC Fight Pass tweeted during the early fights, “Due to overwhelming traffic you may be experiencing log in issues.” A media site was also experiencing lags and outages. The fight started later than its schedule midnight ET target time.
According to Internet security firm Irdeto, an estimated 2.93 million watched the stream illegally online Saturday night. The fight also grossed $2.4 million in box office at 481 theaters. As for PPV, the fight is projected to make $500 million in the U.S. and $700M worldwide.
Showtime said today it will re-air the fight Saturday at 9 PM ET/PT, followed by the premiere of All Access: Mayweather vs. McGregor Epilogue.
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