Match pops up on phones as TV habits change
It should have been a proud moment for TV: A muchhyped sports event drawing in millions of paying viewers and showcasing the clout still held by traditional media heavyweights.
Instead, the broadcast of Mayweather-Pacquiao fight in Las Vegas was marred by technical snafus and got sucker punched by Internet streamers, exposing the industry’s vulnerabilities.
An estimated 3 million households were expected to buy pay-perview access to the fight at nearly $100 (`6333) a pop Saturday night. But the heavy demand created problems for some cable and satellite TV subscribers who tried to order it at the last minute.
And it popped up, unauthorized, on new services like Twitter’s Periscope and Meerkat, where people used their smartphones to broadcast directly to the Internet.
It’s a sign of how comfortable people are getting watching video on small screens from new types of platforms and providers, whether it’s Periscope, Snapchat or Netflix. It also shows how common piracy is in the entertainment industry.
Experts said it isn’t likely that someone willing to pay for the fight would instead settle for a lowerquality stream that might get shut down at any time. Given that, the companies behind the event’s telecast may not have lost much money to the streamers, they said.
HBO and Showtime have not yet said how many people paid to watch Saturday night’s fight.