Why Did Netflix’s Tyson-Paul Stream Fail at Scale—Or Did it Fail at All?
Netflix’s live-streamed Mike Tyson-Jake Paul fight stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy in late 2024, from “Was it a real fight?” to “Was the stream itself an epic fail?” The streaming fail claims stemmed from 1 million-plus users reporting buffering problems and worse. So, what went wrong?
Only Netflix engineers know, assert Akamai’s Will Law and YouTube’s Sean McCarthy in this clip from Streaming Media Connect. And is a stream that seemingly satisfies 59 out of 60 million viewers such an epic fail? And what can the industry learn about unexpected traffic bursts and other challenges Netflix faced, asks Swerve Sports’ Christy Tanner, in what might prove the ultimate tech-centric Tyson-Paul post mortem.
Not an epic fail!
Will Law argues that the fight was not an epic failure if looked at by the successful numbers alone. “Everyone says, ‘Oh my God, there were a million people who had rebuffing issues,’ and this was talked about in the press. I see it is completely different. 59 million people didn't have rebuffing issues!”
He puts it into perspective compared to Netflix’s previous venture into mass live streaming. “I think March of ‘23 was Netflix's first live event. So, in two years they've ramped up to deliver 59 million rebuff free sessions. That's fantastic. It's not for us to say how or where [the issues] occurred. The engineering Netflix team is very, very capable. They know those issues. They are not going to happen again. They are going to solve them, and new issues will open up, but they will diminish over time. They have a fantastic capability to deliver live traffic. They're doing it from a platform. They're vertically integrated. They control the player and the delivery network. They're doing all that network planning. So, I have a very different view seeing all the challenges that come with scale of that size. I thought they did very, very well. If it happens for the next three live events, yes, that's a failure to solve problems, but I don't think Netflix is going to fail to solve those problems.”
Why the unique audience nature of the Tyson-Paul match should be considered
Tanner argues that the unique nature of the Tyson-Paul match and the atypical fan base that streamed it should be considered.
“I think some of the unpredictability of the Tyson-Paul match originated with the social nature of Jake Paul's band base,” she says. “And so that is something really different from the NFL, which is fairly predictable. Whereas the combat sports fan base and the social fan base that Jake Paul brings with him brought an element of unpredictability to that event that I think perhaps would've been very difficult for even the savviest streamer to prepare for, along with the idea that multiple devices in a household might be streaming at the same time from the same account. It brought with it a lot of tricky aspects. And the one last thing I'd say about it is that I don't think Netflix is held to similar standards as, for instance, a broadcaster streaming an event. So, there is a little bit more wiggle room for them to experiment and take risks and fail.”
The critical relationships between content owners and delivery partners like CDNs and ISPs
McCarthy emphasizes the importance of considering the complexities of delivery from content owners and delivery partners like CDNs and ISPs.
“I think a lot of this is related to capacity planning on the CDN side, but also partnerships with the ISPs, the big ASNs, the ones that have known congestion issues,” he says. “At a certain point, a CDN can throw as many servers as they want at this, but if there's congestion at the pairing points at the last mile, [with] ISPs, there's very little they can actually do. Netflix's topology is to build pretty deep into the ISPs. I think that's how you're going to scale live video. Getting as close to the cell towers as possible is how you will scale this to 50, 60, plus million viewers and deliver a high quality experience. [It is] one thing to throw multiple CDNs at the problem, which is what a lot of the big broadcasters do, [like] we did at Paramount Plus, and it's necessary, but I don't know if it's sufficient when you reach that sort of scale.”
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