So the big fight happened Saturday night. You know the one: Mayweather and Pacquiao, five years of "will they or won't they," finally in the ring at the MGM Grand. I'm not going to sit here and recap the fight itself because if you wanted twelve rounds of Mayweather circling and jabbing and not getting hit, there are a hundred sports blogs that'll do that better than I can. What I want to talk about is what happened before the opening bell, because as a tech story it's honestly way more interesting than anything that happened once the gloves were on.
Cable and satellite providers straight up could not sell you the fight. DirecTV's ordering system choked. Comcast had people getting error messages for the better part of an hour. I know because I was one of them — sat there at like 8:40 refreshing my Xfinity app trying to add the PPV to my account, getting nothing but a spinning wheel, while my brother-in-law texted me from his place saying his order went through fine on Charter. No consistency to it at all. This was a $99.95 HD purchase (99.95 for a boxing match, let that sink in for a second), the most expensive PPV ever put out, and a huge chunk of the people trying to pay for it legitimately couldn't get the system to take their money. That's a special kind of infrastructure failure.
And then there was Periscope.
Here's the part that actually got me thinking. Twitter's live video app, the one they bought back in January and only opened up to the public about six weeks ago, turned into the pirate broadcast of choice for anyone who either couldn't get the PPV to load or just didn't want to pay a hundred bucks. People were propping their phones up in front of their TVs and streaming the whole fight live, and thousands of people were watching those streams instead of paying for their own. Meerkat too, though it felt like Periscope was doing most of the damage just because of the built-in Twitter audience.
HBO and Showtime, who split the broadcast, apparently spent a good chunk of the night sending takedown notices trying to get individual streams pulled, and from what I've read they were having Twitter kill them one by one, which is a losing game when a new person can just prop their phone back up thirty seconds later. This is the exact scenario people were predicting when Periscope launched, and it took about six weeks for it to actually happen at scale on live TV. Nobody built a kill switch for this because nobody building these apps really wants to think that hard about the piracy use case before launch — you build the fun live-streaming thing first and you deal with the DMCA emails later.
I don't think this kills pay-per-view exactly, but I do think it's the first real crack in it that regular non-tech people actually noticed. My mother-in-law, who does not know what an app is in any meaningful sense, asked me at dinner on Sunday if I'd "watched it on the phone thing." That's the tell. When it crosses over into casual conversation with people who don't follow this stuff, it's not a niche story anymore.
The bigger question nobody's really answering yet is what the actual legal exposure is here for the people doing the streaming versus Periscope itself versus Twitter as a company. Right now it feels like everyone's just going to let this one go because good luck suing forty thousand individual phone-holders, but the next mega PPV event is going to have someone at HBO or Showtime insisting on a much more aggressive real-time takedown system, and that's going to cost money and slow the whole product down. Somebody's going to have to build actual detection tooling for this instead of manually flagging streams one at a time, which is apparently what happened Saturday.
Also, unrelated complaint, but if you're going to charge a hundred dollars for a boxing match your ordering system needs to survive traffic. That's not a hot take, that's just table stakes. I don't care how big the fight is.
Anyway. Pacquiao says his shoulder was hurt going in, there's already talk of an immediate rematch nobody particularly wants, and Periscope just got a real stress test it didn't ask for. Interesting week.