What you can learn from the #epicfail of the Mayweather vs. McGregor Live Stream

Even if you aren’t totally invested in boxing, you’re probably like me and were moderately interested in the Fight of the Century between Floyd Mayweather and Connor McGregor a couple weeks ago.

During the time of the fight, I was at a company retreat with all my staff. We went to UFC.TV to purchase the fight so we could watch it and I experienced what many did.

I could not get in.

UFC’s chat response to this issue was to watch on a pirated stream. The fight was what I expected it to be, even though we had to watch it with streaming issues.

The response from UFC president Dana White, castrating NeuLion on social media and in every media interview he did, was also no surprise.

Full Disclosure: I have worked with NeuLion in the past

First off. What Dana did not say in his post event comments is that NeuLion has provided the UFC a premium service for their UFC.TV experience for years.

They have in many ways defined what a live streaming event should be, and from what Dana and NeuLion have told me, it has been a great partnership.

Personally, I worked with NeuLion for a short time. Years ago, when I got a call from BodyBuilding.Com to broadcast the Mr. Olympia and Arnold Classic bodybuilding championships I was completely out of my league. Up until that point, the biggest event The Streaming Network had produced as a corporate webcasting provider was 5,000 concurrent viewers and my contact at BodyBuilding.com was talking about 100,000 simultaneous viewers (they ended up getting 300,000) and I had to turn to NeuLion.

And NeuLion delivered.

They provided me and my customer an almost perfect experience. At every stage of the engagement they told us why we needed to invest where we did and what they could and could not support. In the end, all parties were happy and I have to thank NeuLion for that.

BUT…I fully understand where Dana is coming from.

The Streaming Network has always prided ourselves on working with the very best technology partners we have access to.

For the past four years that has been , but before that we relied on partners like NeuLion and others for certain events like the Mr. Olympia. As such, I have been put in the position that Dana is in a number of times (Well not exactly like Dana in that I didn’t have hundreds of thousands of angry fans who were threatening class action lawsuits), but as a service provider myself I have had to defend my decisions for selecting my providers and took it on the chin for the issues said providers may have caused.

There are two key elements to every broadcast like this: technology and people.

Human error can create an issue

We still don’t know exactly what happened with the fight live stream and what caused the issues, but sometimes the technology has nothing to do with it.

There are humans behind the technology and people can make mistakes. I should disclose that there have been times (more than I would like to admit) that the issue our customers faced had nothing to do with the underlying technology selected to serve up there event, but the humans we entrusted to make the event a success.

The important piece to remember is to learn from these mistakes and make changes.

What can we learn about this experience?

When your cell phone drops you understand that any issues that may result from that are because you dropped your phone, you don’t switch cell phone providers.

When your office internet goes down for 10 minutes you recognize it was a blip.

When your CRM provider does not properly process your renewal and your account shuts down for a day you get pissed off and ask for a credit but you don’t migrate to a new CRM.

…But when your live event goes down it is another story.

Each live event you deliver, whether it is a broadcast like Dana’s UFC.TV extravaganza, a webinar, or any sort of virtual event it is likely the biggest communication you are running that week, that month or maybe that year! So you need to ensure that the partner you entrust can handle that immense responsibility.

Platform first!

Regardless of how much you trust the person/team you are going to work with, you need to vet the platform first. Can it handle the load you are going to provide? Do they serve similar companies? Do they serve the audience you are looking to reach? Can they share their infrastructure and disaster recovery protocols?

After you have decided that the platform meets your business outcome needs, you should be vetting it for the “what if” scenario. As someone who has been in the game for over a decade and been a part of over 20K virtual events I have learned the hard way that you need to ask the “what if” questions or you will get burned.

..so what happens when there is an issue?

Technology is not perfect, things happen during a live event and at that point the people behind it are really what saves the day.

When looking for a partner, consider the business outcomes you need. Find a partner that has experience with companies similar to yours, reaching a similar audience as your target, and meets all of your criteria.

If the team or the technology is not up the task, you will experience an issue.

Learn more about the The Streaming Network Team:

My Opinion: What did Dana and the UFC do wrong?

In my experience Dana and the UFC did everything right.

They worked with a provider with a proven track record for delivering high volume and high profile streaming experiences. The team behind it had years of experience delivering and troubleshooting issues and he cannot be blamed for his vendor selection (it’s not like NeuLion is the cheapest option out there).

I cannot even really blame him for blaming them afterwards BUT as a service provider myself I would have liked to see him stand by his provider and address the issue differently.

I don’t have all (or any of the information really), but in my experience this is an example of a good provider falling down in a big way on a big stage.

To my friends at NeuLion: Keep your chin up and, as we all do, learn from whatever mistake occurred here and continue to revolutionize the Live Streaming Game as you have for many years!

Matt