Like millions of others across the world, I watched the Pacquiao-Mayweather fight in a living room surrounded by other boxing fans. Except, the living room wasn't mine and my co-watchers were virtual.
That's right, like many, many others, I watched Mayweather defeat Pacquiao on Periscope.
A few days ago, we joked in the newsroom that the live streaming services Meerkat and Periscope would be heavily used during this "fight of the century." We had no-idea how prescient that would be.
I never had any intention of paying $90 to $100 for the fight; I'll watch it on HBO next week. But after waking up from my Kentucky Derby-induced hangover and finding that the fight was just starting, I decided to see if Periscope had any decent streams of the fight.
Did it ever. I tuned in in the third round and was able to see dozens and dozens of fight streams in the global "live" menu. Tapping into a few streams, it was quickly apparent that some were just standard Periscopes of friends at a fight-night party, while others were focused intently on television sets or computer screens playing the fight in real time.
Keep in mind, Periscope is still relatively U.S.-centric and its iPhone-only nature skews its demographics somewhat. Still, this was the first time I've seen so many global streams — certainly at one time.
This wasn't really a problem, however, because like a hydra, we could just go to another Periscope stream somewhere else in the world to watch the fight on someone else's TV.
Soon, viewers started to notice a trend. If a Periscope session go too many "hearts" (Periscope lingo for favorites, achieved by tapping on the screen), a stream would get shut down.
Viewers started to harangue the users who were obsessively "hearting" the Periscope streams, telling them to stop or the stream would get shut down.
The stream I ended up watching for half the fight was in Spanish (but still very viewable) and it had more than 10,000 people in it at its peak. That's right. 10,000 people, all watching some guy's stream of the fight in Spanish on his high-def TV.
After the fight was over, as audience awaited the judges' decision, commentary broke out over who should win. In my stream, Pacquiao was the clear favorite, and there was a barage of boos and jeers when Mayweather was deemed the winner.
It's to frame the Periscope narrative as one about the new realm of piracy; and there's plenty to discuss there, from the complex economics of fighters' earning 9-figure payouts to the future of set-top cable television and old-school PPV in an increasingly digital and mobile environment.
Let's be honest: Most of the people who watched the fight over Periscope never had any intention of paying for the fight. Ever. Media companies can and will wring their hands over lost revenue — and that's a potentially valid concern if this sort of thing becomes mainstream.
@AnthonyQuintano So, the broadcasts by @HBOboxing @darrenrovell @YahooSports and others weren't amazing?
Still, the truth is, watching a video stream of someone recording their TV doesn't replicate the experience or quality of watching a fight on TV any more than Handycam movie bootlegs replicate the theatrical experience.
From an experiential perspective, this exercise really did feel like being in someone else's home at their fight-night party.
The transformative aspect of Periscope and other live streaming apps is that it can take you to a place in a much more intimate way than we've experienced before.
There is something compelling (and addictive) about watching live video. This was true 15 years ago when Josh Harris was using the medium on Pseudo.com (the experiment and the rise and fall of Harris is brilliantly recalled in Ondi Timoner's documentary We Live in Public) and when Big Brother debuted on TV and its true today.
The difference is that 15 years ago — even five years ago — streaming was something only a few people could do. Today, anyone with a smartphone can do it. And that's powerful.
I'll most certainly watch the entire Pacquiao-Mayweather fight on HBO next week. It was a good fight and I'd like to see it with my husband, who knows far more about boxing than I do. But something tells me the experience won't be as electric as it was watching in the living room in Spanish with 10,000 other Internet denizens.


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Q: How to align table-cells in HTML5? The attributes valign and align seems to be not supported in html5.
How to do that now in html5 - with table-cells?
<td valign="top" colspan="2" style="height:50px;" > hello world </td>

A: With css: vertical-align and text-align respectively.

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