It’s Super Bowl weekend and Sunday’s game between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Kansas City Chiefs isn’t the only clash on the NFL’s radar. International Game Pass customers have filed a putative class action against the league over livestream failures during last year’s big event.
An Australian man is suing on behalf of himself and other customers who bought the NFL’s Game Pass International Weekly or Annual “Pro” Subscription — of which the suit estimates there are somewhere between 300,000-700,000 individuals in about 181 countries who paid the equivalent of approximately $200 for the service. While Game Pass customers can also access livestreams and on-demand videos of all regular season games, the suit argues the primary draw of the subscription is the ability to watch the Super Bowl live.
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Just a few minutes into the broadcast the livestream crashed, according to the complaint, and it was also unstable during the final minutes of the game. The international Game Pass customers didn’t have an easy or free alternative to watch the game live and complained that customer “responded with generic copy-and-paste” messages to users who reported their issues.
“Live viewing of the Super Bowl is a non-substitutable good,” states the complaint, which was filed Thursday in New York federal court. “Not even uninterrupted viewing of the game later is an adequate substitute for live viewing because the publicity and social media commentary on the game inevitably means that a person viewing the game later will have already learned of the outcome of the game. Knowing the outcome of the game diminishes the excitement and interest of viewing the game live along with billions of other excited viewers worldwide.”
A few days after the Super Bowl, the NFL offered customers who had complained — but not everyone affected by the outage, according to the complaint — a $10 partial refund. The proposed class is: “All persons who purchased Game Pass from Defendants for the 2019 to 2020 NFL season.”
The high-profile fight between Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather Jr. in 2017 experienced similar streaming difficulties and prompted a deluge of suits against Showtime and the UFC. Those settled without much fanfare.
The NFL has not yet responded to a request for comment.
Super Bowl LV at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida will air Sunday on CBS at 6:30 p.m. ET and stream live on the CBS All Access and CBS Sports apps and online at CBSsports.com.
