Last night I tried to order the Affliction: Banned pay-per-view because I thought it might do some good to support another promotion, give them my $40, hope for a night of good fights, and encourage some competition to the UFC. I have a DVR and had no problem recording UFC Fight Night 14 in order to watch Affliction live. So I order the pay-per-view, switch over to FSN to watch the undercard and watch a terrible fight between Paul Buentello and Gary Goodridge and then a nasty Vitor Belfort KO over Terry Martin. Once the undercard was over, I switched over to the pay-per-view channel, channel 501 on Comcast and it was just a black screen with a message that said “This channel will be available shortly.”

So I’m thinking “Okay, we’ll wait a few minutes.” A few minutes go by and another message comes up that says “Your purchase cannot be processed, please call your local office.” So I called and got put on hold for what seemed like days. Not getting through to anyone at the local office, I called 1-800-Comcast to see if they could help me. I got put on hold even longer at the 1-800-Comcast number than I did at the local number. So I hopped online to get into a Live Chat to see what the deal was. At this point the event had already started and I was put into a queue on their live chat support and I was sixth in line.

I finally get into the chat room, tell the person what’s going on and he tries to fix it. Still no dice. By this time I had found an alternate way to watch the pay per view so I wasn’t too worried about it so I told the guy to just cancel my order and be done with it. I don’t know how many of you deal with Comcast, but I’ve only had them for two months and their service has been downright terrible. This was just the icing on the cake for me. The guy kept trying to fix it after I told him to cancel it and I finally had to be an asshole about it and tell him to cancel the order, make sure I don’t get billed for it, and be done with it.

Now, I don’t know if this was just an issue with my local Comcast provider or whether it was widespread. I’ve heard a couple of other people comment about the same issue. That’s why I’m posting this little anecdote because if it was widespread, Affliction cannot be happy. Comcast is the biggest cable provider in the U.S. and if something was going on with their service at the time, it could affect Affliction’s buyrate and could possibly have cost them quite a bit of money.

So my question to you readers is: Did Comcast screw you on Affliction: Banned last night? If so, please comment in the comments section. We’d like to hear your story to see just how widespread the problem was. If it was widespread then this could be a big story and could hurt Affliction’s bottom line. We want to hear from you.