So Saturday night happened. If you were anywhere near the internet you already know what I'm talking about, the "fight of the century" between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, the one that's been getting talked up since basically forever and that a shocking number of people paid real money to watch.
I did not pay real money to watch it directly. Nobody in my apartment did, actually, which is sort of the whole point of this post.
My buddy Dave ordered it through his cable box around 8:30, the usual way you'd do a PPV, and the order just sat there. Spinning wheel. He tried again. Same thing. We assumed it was a fluke on his end until three different group texts confirmed half the East Coast was having the exact same problem. Between the actual PPV providers and whatever backend was handling the orders, the system just couldn't handle the number of people trying to hand over their $99 at the same time. Nothing dramatic, no error message, just a screen that never quite loaded the broadcast.
Here's the part that actually made me want to write this down. Somebody in Dave's building had their TV pointed at a phone, and that phone was running Periscope, and within about ten minutes Periscope was running on basically every phone in the room. If you haven't used it yet, it's the live streaming app that launched back in March, and up until Saturday I mostly thought of it as a thing people used to show off their brunch. Turns out it's also an extremely effective way to watch a boxing match you didn't pay for, streamed live from somebody else's living room, complete with their friends yelling in the background the whole time.
It didn't last, though. Every few minutes a stream would just cut out mid-punch, and a new one would pop up somewhere else with a slightly different angle and someone else's couch in frame. Twitter was apparently pulling these down about as fast as they went up, honoring takedown requests in something close to real time, and it genuinely felt like watching a game of whack-a-mole where the mole was several thousand illegal boxing streams. We ended up bouncing between three different Periscopes over the course of the night because each one got killed right as things got interesting.
Here's my complaint, and I know it's an unpopular opinion in a room full of people who just handed over a hundred bucks: the fight itself wasn't very good. Mayweather won on points, unanimous decision, and there wasn't one moment where I felt like I was watching something historic. A ninety-nine dollar screen that won't load is at least an interesting story. A ninety-nine dollar fight where one guy backs away from the other guy for twelve straight rounds is not.
What's actually stuck with me isn't the fight, its that a piece of software that launched what, five or six weeks ago, was suddenly capable of putting a real dent in how a hundred-million-dollar pay-per-view event gets distributed. Nobody at the networks built a plan for what happens when every phone in every living room can broadcast to the entire internet for free, instantly, with basically zero setup. Meerkat has been doing something similar since SXSW back in March and everyone treated it like a novelty for showing off conference talks. Turns out the actual use case was always going to be sports, or at least the parts of sports people don't want to pay for.
I don't think this kills pay-per-view overnight or anything that dramatic. Plenty of people paid full price and watched it exactly the way they were supposed to, on an actual TV, with an actual signal that worked fine for them. But the fact that thousands of people just didn't, and instead watched shaky vertical video of somebody else's flatscreen with a bunch of strangers talking over it, is the kind of thing that ought to worry whoever runs the numbers on these broadcast deals. It's not a great viewing experience. It doesn't need to be a great one. It just needs to be free and available right now, and right now turns out to be worth a lot.
Anyway. Dave's cable box order finally went through around the start of the eighth round, at which point we'd already watched most of the fight through somebody else's window into their living room. Refund request is still pending, and I am not holding my breath.