Horrible or non-existent Mayweather-McGregor fight streams prompt lawsuit

Enlarge / Floyd Mayweather Jr. (L) hits Conor McGregor in the sixth round of their super welterweight boxing match at T-Mobile Arena on August 26, 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Mayweather won by 10th-round TKO. (credit: Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

Showtime was hit with a federal class-action lawsuit amid reports that it delivered shoddy or non-existent $99 streams of the Floyd Mayweather-Conor McGregor fight Saturday. This is contrary to Showtime's promise of 1080p resolution at 60 frames per second.

"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," declared the lawsuit (PDF) filed in federal court on behalf of a Portland man named Zack Bartel. The suit seeks to represent "thousands of other consumers" unable to stream the Mayweather fight in HD as Showtime advertised.

Defendant intentionally misrepresented the quality and grade of video consumers would see using its app, and knowingly failed to disclose that its system was defective with respect to the amount of bandwidth available, and that defendant's service would materially fail to conform to the quality of HD video defendant promised.

Bartel bought the service from the Showtime pay-per-view app to stream on his Apple TV, the suit said.

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