The start of Saturday’s world welterweight title fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao in Las Vegas was delayed by about 45 minutes due to problems surrounding the processing of late pay-per-view orders through US pay-television providers.
Viewers reported issues with US providers such as Optimum, DirecTV, Charter, Comcast, Time Warner and AT&T. Problems ranged from issues with ordering to pixilated or blank screens after the broadcast had started.
HBO spokesperson Roy Stallone told the Yahoo Sports news website that there were no technical problems and that the delay was only to let the companies process the backlog of orders. HBO and Showtime, which co-produced coverage of the event, tried to push viewers to process their orders earlier in the day through marketing campaigns, but 90 per cent of the orders were processed in the final hours before the fight.
In other news, Todd DuBoef, the president of the event’s co-promoter Top Rank, said that the company plans to pursue legal action following apparent widespread piracy of the fight on video-sharing applications and websites.
“We’ll have to pursue any people who are allowing people to distribute something that is behind a proprietary wall,” DuBoef told the Los Angeles Times newspaper. “We’ll have to challenge those technology companies that are facilitating it and we’re going to have to take a legal position against them.”