Jokes on you, condescending MMA fans that refuse to believe Invicta’s popularity. Last weekend’s Invicta FC 4 stream crashed not because of technological problems from the promotion, but from the Ustream platform itself. Now you can stop making your snide Twitter jokes that Invicta’s numbers were inflated — they weren’t that funny anyway. On MMAJunkie radio today, Ustream CEO Brad Hunstable stated that Invicta’s demand far outweighed what Ustream was capable of in their newly released PPV payment system.
“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,” Hunstable said. “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.”
Although I paid for Invicta FC 4 this past weekend, I had to resort to an illegal stream of the show — like most MMA fans that Saturday evening. Of course, that will be the last time I will ever use an illegal stream because piracy is bad, right? *Cough* Can’t stop the internet *Cough*.