MMA Junkie reports on the botched Internet PPV plans of Invicta FC this past weekend. It was the organization’s first attempt at PPV and many attempting to watch the iPPV were unable to view it after paying.
The organization used USTREAM, an online live streaming platform, on Saturday night. Unfortunately, people had problems.
Via MMA Junkie:
Some said they spent a half-hour or more trying to get USTREAM to accept their payment so they could watch the event. Others paid for a stream that wouldn’t start or simply wouldn’t stop crashing in the middle of fights.
Invicta CEO Shannon Knapp acknowledged the issue and promised to refund those that paid for the PPV and requested that the pay wall be taken down. Invicta could not contact anyone from USTREAM about the problem on Saturday night.
The USTREAM CEO offered an apology after the fact and placed fault on his company. He cited the demand for the $7.95 live PPV as the reason it had problems.
Knapp remained even keel about the problem as she cited that the event on Saturday had 3,000 pre-sale purchases and stated 70,000 viewers joined the streaming once the pay wall went down.
Payout Perspective:
Can we trust technology? Wrestling organization Ring of Honor has had iPPV problems in the past. Live streaming always seems easy but when a pay wall is involved things appear to go haywire. The problems experienced by USTREAM had to be the worst thing for Invicta considering the number of potential buys reflect a loss of a lot of revenue. And for a small company, it has to hurt that Invicta gave a refund back to those that paid for the stream. Still, the refund was the right thing to do. Knapp stated on Sherdog Rewind that the goal of the iPPV was not to generate money but to show potential television buyers the interest of the product. From a PR perspective, it had to minimize the damage and having some people pay while others did not would only cause more headaches. As it is, its likely that the iPPV venture likely became a money loser. Knapp can turn this issue into a positive by citing the number of those interested in her product, but the execution of this event can be seen as a reflection on the organization.
Reflection on Ustream or Invicta?
Both. Invicta, I believe, had used Ustream before, but not with a pay wall which may be the issue. Definitely a reflection on the Ustream pay wall capabilities.
I thought they went the straight CDN route with Akamai for their free streams.
Then they went with shitty ass Ustream for this recent event…
I just watched the replay and there were no problems. They’ll have to stream an event successfully before I’ll actually pay.
It’s not just a UStream issue; streaming combat sports PPVs almost always have issues for whatever reason.