Pay Per View Poll
I stayed up until 1am ET last night to watch the Mayweather McGregor fight.
We used the Showtime Pay Per View app on AppleTV to watch the fight.
We paid $99 to watch the four fights, including the main event.
I heard that many were able to watch the fight for free using Twitter’s Periscope feature.
So I ran this Twitter poll this morning. If you haven’t voted, you can here.
If you watched the fight last night, how did you do it?
— Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) August 27, 2017
It seems like paying $99 to watch at home, as we did, was not the dominant way that folks watched the fight.
“Some Other Way” includes going to a bar to watch it, which may have been the most popular way of all.
Comments (Archived):
I fell asleep too early to watch, but asked a friend who owns a bar if they’d be showing it. He said no, because it would have cost around $5,000 for the rights, and they’re normally full Saturday nights anyways.
Went to the Broad Museum. What a show!
I’d heard that there was some fight in Vegas, then heard that maybe it was yesterday, but didn’t know when it was to happen. I knew nothing about either of the two fighters. So, maybe I watched the fight for free just in my imagination! Ah, what’s in Vegas can stay in Vegas!But this morning I read a short story about the fight: Supposedly there was some guy Mayweather who has a good record and the other guy, some multiple martial arts cage fighter or some such. Mayweather won in round 10 or so as a TKO by the referee.Supposedly the opponent’s problem was that he didn’t have the physical conditioning for 10 rounds, or even 8. In the early rounds he threw lots of punches, landed a few, but most of what he landed just hit Mayweather’s gloves. Then after about 8 rounds the opponent was exhausted, and Mayweather beat him like he was helpless, which he was.Apparently somehow Mayweather has gone 50-0 and is now retired. Amazing.I didn’t spend much time at it!I can understand being out of shape and getting tired too soon! Now time for some exercise, finish mowing the front yard!From getting some work done, darned computer system administration mud wrestling (I won), I neglected the yard work, and the back yard was on the way to 2 feet high. Usually I can mow the whole yard in 3 hours. But for the back, about 70% of the area, on a given row, had to pull the mower backwards to get it on top of the grass and then, on the same row, push it forward to finish the cutting. The pulling backwards was about twice as long as the usual. So, the total was to be about 9 hours instead of 3. But both the pulling and pushing were taking about twice as long as usual due to how high the grass was and how wet it was. Wet? Yup, the wet grass plugged up the exit chute of the mower meaning I had to use a stick I was carrying to knock out the plug. So, we’re up to about 18 hours.LOT’a sweat! Clothes totally soaked. Even socks soaked. Needed a head band or eyes would be soaked, and the headband got totally soaked. Even the gloves got soaked. More than once in the 18 hours I was like that boxer exhausted and weak on his feet!But, good exercise! It was the same for me in football practice in high school — totally soaked with sweat and exhausted. Yup, in high school, all that exercise did increase my strength and endurance! And already so did the 18 hours this time!I’d rather do the work to get my Web site live!Heck I’d rather watch the rest of the videos of the MIT course on quantum mechanics — maybe his physics is good, but his math is AWFUL! I’m glad that so far I understand the math, much better than the physics prof! Heck, it was more fun yesterday just to remind myself of the Courant-Fisher min-max theorem and, then, the interlacing eigenvalues theorem! Yup, I got those two in a high end course in grad school. The Courant-Fisher result is nice to see intuitively. Supposedly those two results have some applications when generalized from finitely many dimensions to Hilbert space, maybe in parts of quantum mechanics!No time for such things! Get some exercise, some more system administration mud wrestling (mostly with the Microsoft program NTBACKUP, amazing program and then SQL Server), then adding data (and writing a little code to get better automation for adding data), modify the code of my Web session state server to get a Web log server (for even early production, I don’t want Microsoft’s approaches to either of those two, and my Web session state server is much better and was dirt simple to write, just a little TCP/IP, object instance de/serialization, and two instances of a standard Microsoft collection class, and the Web log server will be even simpler, just rip out the object stuff and put in a file write statement!).Ah, maybe the exercise is worth it! As every farmer knows, need to get the farming done and for that need to keep the engine of the tractor running!
I didn’t know there was a fight. Shows am out of touch and spending too much time on crypto. Nonetheless, was still on Europe time and fell asleep early!!
I heard vaguely there was some fight happening, but didn’t know/care more about it.Watched the the Women’s World Badminton Singles Final today, what an epic contest ! There should be no losers in such a match….but in sport there is always a winner.
I encourage all to increasingly use their dollars (euros, ether, etc) to express their values. No need to ride Uber, no need to pay Mayweather. http://deadspin.com/for-the…
What a misguided article. Or at least the part I could stomach. They lost me when they kept talking about how poorly educated boxing and MMA fans are. Really? Not only is that wildly wrong, it’s offensive. Both sports are remarkably sophisticated with knowledgeable followers.Every sport has it’s shares of ignorant supporters, but enough of this purist-like deciding for other people what is sophisticated.
sure — i meant to highlight the portion about how mayweather is an awful person and there is no need to support him financially. perhaps this article (linked to from the first one) is what i should have referenced to better make the point i was trying to make: http://deadspin.com/the-tro…
Interesting times. There’s widespread public outrage about misguided aggression in society today, yet our “civil” society has no prob underwriting hundreds of millions of dollars watching two grown men beat the shit out of one another. Yeah, I get it, that’s in the name of sport. Context matters, just depends which context you value most.
A proxy, where we offload our ‘rage’ to remain civil to one another?
Twitter polls – yet another feature that could be so much better…
$100? Aside from being an absurdly high price, does this mean boxing can’t be monetized with advertising (’cause few brands want to be associated with fist to face)?
They haven’t been able to monetize boxing for decades w/ advertising. Used to be a staple on “ABC’s Wide World of Sports” until ratings declined and cable rights fees created a new market and distribution trend. Even Olympic boxing coverage over the air became ratings challenged. Boxing was a big driver of premium cable subscription (HBO/SHO) for years before both networks migrated to PPV. Small but loyal base willing to pay up to $100 per event. Extremely lucrative and profitable for both networks.
Understood. I remember those Wide World of Sports on ABC.
I grew up around fathers and uncles (and it was gender specific in our house – sorry) who watched boxing and was into it from the tail end of Ali’s career to Sugar Ray Leonard and early Tyson days. I like boxing (though not as much as Sumo – helping start the NNTP newsgroup for Sumo I consider my life’s achievement) but they lost me for good when it became $100 for a big fight.
Rob Underwood:But it was available free…..Real boxing fans never die.
Where?
Rob Underwood:Periscope app
Didn’t realize it was broadcast free on Periscope.
watched the fight online, for free, I am extremely happy i didn’t pay to watch such underwhelming fights.. Although I didn’t pay to watch the fight, I still feel i was overcharged!
It doesn’t look like the twitter poll feature includes a way to “just show me the results,” though I may have missed it – I rarely use Twitter. This is probably skewing your results as people who are not interested in responding gravitate to the generic catch-all answer to see results. You may be able to bypass this problem by adding a “I didn’t watch the fight” option or a “just show me the results” option yourself to the poll.
the payme’em model lives.
Watched it on PPV via DirectTV. I love UFC (and used to love boxing until it was out-sported by a better sport), so I found it very interesting. The undercard was quite average, the worst part was the long wait for the main event to come on. And I was surprised how empty the stadium was until just before the main event. The main event itself was better than I expected. I thought McG, whom I really wanted to win for pure upset value, did quite well. But the main thing I was left wondering was whether Mac purposefully allowed the fight to last as long as it did, for his fans, to make up for Pacquiao, etc, in which case he’s even better than everyone thinks.
CONTRIBUTORS:as boxing fans we enjoyed the show. It was entertaining and MMA fans may not understand how boxing protects unprotected fighters who don’t fight back.We would have preferred to see Connor get KO which would have satisfied the majority. Now there is the fringe complaining about the fight being stopped and fixed. In MMA submission is what stops fights. Boxing rules are different.This is the only social media we engage so the vote required signing up for a social media offering we don’t participate in. We Google how to watch the fight free and it provided the many ways. Someone on our group set it up and it worked.Mayweather stated the reason for the long wait were because of outages in two states. His money would have been effected so he as the promoter waited until outages were fixed. Now he can get up to $300 Million for his nights work.Mayweather was off for two years and is forty years old. Image Jordan or Montana attempting to return to their respected sports. Would be non effective.
Saving my time / money for Golovkin v Alvarez pro fight 16th Sep then Vasyl Lomachenko in December {https://www.youtube.com/wat…}
Didn’t drag me in though growing up a huge boxing fan where Cassius Clay was as big a hero as Mickey Mantle.Love global focus though I get it more from something like tonight’s season’s closing episode of GoT. At the level that Breaking Bad was the day of the end. Literally everyone everywhere is talking about it in every store, everywhere.These are things that bind.
awaldstein:There are many who gravitate to different television series because of heritage background. Our group (95% female) are split on what type of television shows on cable at least they admit they watch or discuss.GoT (One male, one women) Power (Starz drama, 50Cents) 25%Americans 15%No television at all 35%Remainder (Keep us out of whatever you guys have going on that doesn’t involve work)
I was kinda disappointed by GoT this season. A bit too predictable
I found the end of last season beginning of this one terrific, end of this one formulaic as the broad epic storyline had to be manipulated towards a conclusion.I love episodic storytelling and believe it is the pace of all communications, corporate and our blogs as well when true.You might like this post on the format I wrote:http://arnoldwaldstein.com/…
I watched boxing until it became more of a grab on and hold game. Fond memories of the 80s and early 90s.I got into UFC back in 2001 when I went in the Army and mixed martial arts was the hand to hand combat they were teaching.Haven’t had the opportunity to get back into UFC over the last few years
That fight likely took $700m with by far the largest revenue coming from non-US pay per view. UFC / Showtime no doubt had a significant effort in shutting down illegal steams. However the reality is that most watching pirate streams were never going to be purchasers at any price point that would have increased overall revenue.But internet streaming is fast becoming pay TVs dirty little secret. For the longest time TV has escaped the Napster style piracy disaster that overwhelmed music. No longer. Simple, consumer friendly solutions like Kodi running on cheap hardware, especially Amazon Fire TV, is now a major issue worldwide. And very hard to defend.
Okay, I found the fight, full thing with good commentary, in English, on YouTube, downloaded the whole thing as an MP4, 271,681,841 bytes, and watched it.Mayweather just played defense for about 8 rounds while McGregor wore himself out hitting air or Mayweather’s gloves.By round 9, McGregor was getting tired, weak in the legs, moving more slowly, not holding his hands up.In round 10, McGregor was so weak and helpless Mayweather was about to wind up just one blow and knock McGregor past the nickel seats when the ref called the TKO before McGregor was seriously hurt.Between the bouts were some slow motion shots that were good.
Tried to purchase it on UFC Fight Pass (but the servers were overloaded so ended up missing the fight cause the site kept crashing due to overwhelming demand). There were lots of complaints (check Twitter – lots are asking for a refund). It was actually cheaper to purchase outside of the USA than in it (something like only 30% of the price). Not sure why they do that.
it’s a funny thing. whenever the circus comes to town… i’m out of town.