Tyson-Paul: A Black Eye for Netflix and Live Sports Streaming?
November 15's mega-hyped boxing match between 28-year-old YouTube self-creation Jake Paul and former world heavyweight champ Mike Tyson, who lost his title seven years before Paul was born, had little to recommend it from a sports perspective. It was a made-for-Netflix event of no consequence other than what Netflix could make of it, and what it would reveal about the likelihood of Netflix realizing its apparent ambitions to establish itself as a viable live event platform, capable of going toe to toe with other streamers who’ve had more success in the live arena, and traditional broadcasters who’ve been doing this for decades.
By most accounts, Netflix succeeded in attracting 60–65 million of its 284 million subscribers to tune into the fight. And if the majority of them, morbidly curious about what the aging and notoriously erratic Tyson would do, mostly showed up to see a train wreck in action, they got exactly what they came to see. Except it was a different sort of train wreck: a VOD world champ failing spectacularly to pull off a massive live event, with widespread and widely reported buffering and outages denying tens of thousands of subscribers their guaranteed ringside seat.
On fight night Netflix crashed and burned, with outage reports on Netdector beginning around 8 PM ET with the undercard (a legitimate championship bout between two light heavyweights) and rising steadily throughout the fight and nearly topping 100,000 at 10:45 PM ET. Near-six-digit outages are a far cry from five-nines success. Clearly something about live streaming's sweet science continues to elude them.
Given the fiscal capital Netflix invested in the fighters--a reported $60 million just to step into the ring--and the millions more on promotion, they clearly regarded this as a landmark event and expected to serve an extraordinary number of streams, many of them to new viewers who subscribed just to see the fight. Failing to build and deploy the infrastructure needed to support those streams seems the height of hubris.
Of course, the fight itself was flat-footed and borderline-unwatchable for those viewers who actually got to see it. But the real unmitigated disaster was the fight’s literal unwatchability due to outages, freezing, and constant buffering. Netflix even struggled on the production end, with comms issues scuttling Evander Holyfield’s pre-fight interview (ringside announcers reported the problem was Holyfield's earphones and not his reconstructed ear).
Predictably, hashtags like #CancelNetfix and #UnsubNetflixToday proliferated on X during and after the event. Netflix maintained stony silence on the delivery issues through at least the 48 hours after the fight, while defiantly claiming victory like any pummeled palooka, citing viewership numbers topping 60 million. (How many of them actually saw any of the fight?) With the VOD giant’s next premium live broadcast—a Christmas Day NFL doubleheader—just weeks away, sports fans planning to tune in again have ample reason to expect another lump of coal.
Ironically, Netflix subscribers who quietly bypassed the fight in favor of regular non-scheduled programming spent the evening blissfully unaware of the disaster unfolding on the live side of the platform. As Harmonic’s Jeff Gilbert reported in a detailed and insightful LinkedIn post on Saturday morning, the service’s VOD infrastructure continued to hum along merrily without incident. But if anyone enjoying the latest seasons of Outer Banks or The Lincoln Lawyer was tweeting #JustNetflixAndChillin during the Tyson-Paul disaster, it never reached anywhere near the crescendo of the calls to cancel inspired by the concurrent unraveling live stream.
No one notices when streaming just works. Which is as it should be.
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