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Good news if you hadn’t yet spent your $20 on The Match! Bad news for television executives!
The Match between Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson was supposed to be groundbreaking in several ways. The purse was the biggest one-day windfall we’d ever seen. The broadcast would not only acknowledge gambling but embrace it. There would be new technology incorporated into the coverage that we’d never seen. And it was going to be the first ever golf event on pay-per-view.
Going to be.
Around 3:30 p.m. ET, it became clear that everyone was getting the streaming version for free on Bleacher Report Live. There were some tweets from some dissatisfied customers who could not get the stream to load. But by and large, the primary tech problem was ... this was suddenly free? All you had to do was pop open B/R Live and there it was, Tiger and Phil playing their Match.
There was a delay of about 15 minutes at the start but that was thought to be a stall to iron out some technical problems and also potentially scoop up the last-minute purchasers. But then the Match went one hole and two holes and an hour deep and it was still free. Apparently, the B/R purchasing function was not working at the start as demand spiked between the 2 and 3 p.m. ET hour. Here’s golf writer Alan Shipnuck with a screenshot of the problem he was having:
Any other Roku users getting this message? ♂️ pic.twitter.com/4GLclDhs46
— Alan Shipnuck (@AlanShipnuck) November 23, 2018
Then about two and a half hours after it started, ESPN’s Darren Rovell tweeted confirmation that, uh, this was indeed a deliberate move to make it free to everyone.
BREAKING: Source says Turner execs decided to give Phil-Tiger match away for free on B/R Live streaming platform (instead of $20 charge) when purchase function broke down to point where those who bought had trouble getting in.
— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) November 23, 2018
Not great!
The move to make it free when the house was starting to catch fire is commendable enough. The technology failing at the most critical moment is not. The loudest gripe came from those who purchased the $19.99 match in advance but the assumption is that some refund is headed that way.
The biggest test of this experiment was always going to be the PPV numbers. How many would pay for this sort of made-for-TV event? Now we’ll never really know and a network that paid a boatload of money for rights and a bunch of executives getting paid a boatload to make this thing go are probably not having a great evening.
