Why Invicta's Weekend PPV was a technical Fiasco

It was too popular!




Silver Lining Alert: Invicta’s PPV Stream Was a Fiasco Because It Was *Too* Popular

As Marlo Stanfield might say, this sounds like one of them good problems.

We already know that Invicta’s first attempt at selling an Internet pay-per-view blew up in their faces over the weekend. But what exactly went down that night? In an interview with MMAJunkie Radio,
Ustream CEO Brad Hunstable took full responsibility for the fiasco, and
credited the unprecedented popularity of Invicta’s broadcast for the
technical difficulties:

“First off, let me just say how apologetic and sorry we are for
what happened for the fans. I’m a big MMA fan. I’ve been in the
community for years, and I don’t like it when any of our broadcasters
have issues, let alone a sport that I love and am passionate about. I
take it especially serious, especially in this case.

Unfortunately what happened was —and the issue was on Ustream’s
end, it was not on Invicta’s end — was that believe it or not, our
payment system, which is in sort of a beta program at the moment, got
overloaded.

There were too many tickets being sold. We’ve done lots of
pay-per-views over the last year, from the UFC to the Rugby World Cup to
working with World Cup-qualifying soccer matches. The load of tickets
being sold, we just hadn’t seen a level of that to date, and that’s
ultimately what happened.

I’ve seen the data myself. It’s pretty clear that this was the
most popular pay-per-view that we’ve seen on Ustream…We just had not
seen a pace of ticket sales at this speed, so we were caught a little
bit off-guard.

We don’t expect this to happen again. It’s something that’s a
fairly straightforward fix from out standpoint. Unfortunately, we just
had never encountered an event of this size and scale. We’ve got to make
some changes, and we’ll make those changes over the coming days. We
don’t expect any issues moving forward.”

When Shannon Knapp revealed last year that Invicta’s first two events both drew over 200,000 viewers to their free streams, it seemed like a rather dubious claim. (Bellator rarely breaks 200k viewers
on MTV2, and they’ve been around since 2009.) But now that Ustream’s
CEO is saying that Invicta is blowing away the video site’s previous
audiences for UFC and World Cup events (!?), it’s becoming harder and
harder to deny: There is an audience for women’s MMA, and
Invicta FC has found it. The only challenge that remains is staying in
business, and converting online fan interest into actual money.

If they can pull it off, MMA will be changed forever. If not…the tombstone beckons.

FYI, I didn't watch.

I'm calling bullshit.

I think this was their way of apologizing to Shannon Knapp for not giving a shit enough about this extremely popular event to answer her phone calls when it was fuckin up.

gotta call bullshit and say that its UStreams fault, anyone catch the Davis Bazsler fight? it was pretty good, hope Showtime merges OneFC, Invicta and something else like ProElite

Birdofthad wrote:

gotta call bullshit and say that its UStreams fault, anyone catch the Davis Bazsler fight? it was pretty good, hope Showtime merges OneFC, Invicta and something else like ProElite

OneFC is amazing by itself. I hope it gets on TV but I wouldn't call for a merger.