Guy sues Showtime because he says stream quality of Mayweather-McGregor sucked

This frustrated viewer is pulling no punches.
 By 
Sasha Lekach
 on 
Guy sues Showtime because he says stream quality of Mayweather-McGregor sucked
Streaming issues have viewers ready to fight. Credit: JOHN GURZINSKI/AFP/Getty Image

The big fight over the weekend left some would-be viewers up in arms.

Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Conor McGregor fought for 28 minutes on Saturday night. But many people couldn't see the boxing match, so one frustrated viewer decided to sue Showtime in a class-action lawsuit.

The plaintiff, Zack Bartel, lives in Oregon, and on behalf of other frustrated viewers, sued for what he claimed was a terrible viewing experience after doling out $99.99 to stream the fight on the Showtime PPV app.

"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," the lawsuit claims.

Here's the full suit, screenshots and all, showing the alleged sub-par viewing experience. Bartel even gathered tweets from others upset about app quality to show that this wasn't an isolated event.

When reached for comment, a Showtime spokesperson replied the company "cannot comment on ongoing litigation."

The Showtime app wasn't the only thing experiencing technical difficulties Saturday night. Pay-per-view issues delayed the fight, so even those who had purchased the fight through their cable providers were frustrated.

ESPN's Dick Vitale was enraged and in "panic mode" when his PPV wasn't working at a fight watch party. He went on a massive tweetstorm to voice his annoyance with his cable provider. It turned out Frontier was one of the cable companies affected by outages.

The suit asks for restitution for app costs for viewers who didn't see anything close to the "1080p resolution" and "60 frames per second" that was promised.

Looks like the streaming fight is on.

Mashable Image
Sasha Lekach

Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.

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