Boxing match marred by snafus

Associated Press

NEW YORK

It should have been a proud moment for TV: A much-hyped sports event drawing in millions of paying viewers and showcasing the clout still held by traditional media heavyweights.

Instead, the broadcast of the Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao fight in Las Vegas was marred by technical snafus and got sucker punched by Internet streamers, exposing the industry’s vulnerabilities.

An estimated 3 million households were expected to buy pay-per-view access to the fight at nearly $100 a pop Saturday night. But the heavy demand created problems for some cable and satellite TV subscribers who tried to order it at the last minute, delaying the start of the fight.

And it popped up, unauthorized, on new services such as Twitter’s Periscope and Meerkat, where people used the video function on their smartphones to relay the broadcast directly to the Internet.

It shows how common piracy is in the entertainment industry and how difficult it is to contain.