While people who illegally streamed Saturday night’s Mayweather-McGregor fight could soon find themselves in trouble, those who actually coughed up their 100 bucks and did things by the book may have been screwed over by Showtime and UFC.TV because of poor quality or not-working streams.
From Showtime: "Due to high demand, we have reports of scattered outages from various cable and satellite provides and the online offering
— Bill Reiter (@sportsreiter) August 27, 2017
(2)… 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."
— Bill Reiter (@sportsreiter) August 27, 2017
If this happened to you, and if you happen to live in Oregon, you may be able to add your name to a class-action lawsuit. We say that because, according to the Hollywood Reporter, Zack Bartel of Portland, Oregon brought about such a suit after he plopped down $99 on the Showtime app for a high definition feed, but instead got what he describes as “grainy video, error screens, buffer events, and stalls.”
Bartel is suing Showtime for “unlawful trade practices and unjust enrichment,” because he claims the company failed to acquire the bandwidth necessary to accommodate the massive quantity of cord-cutting fans.
“Instead of being upfront with consumers about its new, untested, underpowered service, defendant caused likelihood of confusion and misunderstanding as to the source and quality of the HD video consumers would see on fight night,” attorney Michael Fuller said in a complaint that was filed in an Oregon federal court late Saturday night. “Defendant intentionally misrepresented the quality and grade of video consumers would see using its app, and knowingly failed to disclose that its system was defective with respect to the amount of bandwidth available, and that defendant’s service would materially fail to conform to the quality of HD video defendant promised.”
Bartel is seeking the higher total of either $200 in statutory damages, or whatever the amount turns out to be for actual damages. Assuming you want to, you can read the entire 18-page complaint over at THR.
Showtime’s Senior V.P. of Sports Communications, Chris DeBlasio, suggested that anyone who had issues should contact their service provider, though he also added that the network will be handling complaints from people who ordered through Showtimeppv.com or the ShowtimePPV app. “We have received a very limited number of complaints,” he said. “[And we] will issue a full refund for any customer who purchased the event directly from Showtime and were unable to receive the telecast.”
As for the UFC, they said on Tuesday, in a statement that Dana White himself signed off on, that they’d refund the dough to any fan who couldn’t access their stream after purchasing the fight on UFC.TV:
Statement from @DanaWhite: pic.twitter.com/ErvWRnjnVe
— UFC (@ufc) August 29, 2017
