Netflix Claims 60 Million Households Streamed Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul Fight Friday Night, Straining Quality to Breaking Point for Many

Dominic Patten, reporting for Deadline Friday night:

Netflix’s much hyped and much delayed live fight tonight between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul is taking some hits even before the former heavyweight champion and the YouTuber turned boxer have climbed in the ring.

From nearly the start of the undercard bouts from AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, the streamer has been freezing, losing sound and proving slow to reload. While not totally crashing as Netflix did when Luke Cage launched on the streamer in October 2016, the audio on the feed cut out over and over and the quality of the image was reduced to smeared pixels repeatedly.

We watched the whole fight card, and the stream started flaking out early. We had a couple minutes-long segments with what looked like 320p quality, and at other points, the audio completely dropped out for minutes-long stretches, as though the TV were muted. Some people in some places didn’t see any glitches, but it seems like most viewers experienced some.

I thought this boded poorly for Netflix’s upcoming Christmas Day NFL games (and gave them some shit about it on social media) but I vastly underestimated just how many people would watch the Tyson-Paul fight. I was thinking the Christmas NFL games would have more viewers than the fight, but it’s the other way around. Thanksgiving and Christmas NFL games get about 30 million viewers, but Netflix announced they had 60 million “households” for the fight, peaking at 65 million (and with 50 million watching the great women’s title fight that preceded the main event).

That said, the streaming glitches I saw Friday night began early in the evening, during the first fight on the card, a few hours before the main event. It didn’t feel to me to like Netflix’s live event streaming architecture could handle 30 million viewers, either.

It’s easy to forget just how amazing it is that traditional cable TV can deliver a live event to as many people as possible simultaneously. For context, the Super Bowl gets about 100–120 million viewers. Streaming is altogether different. Netflix didn’t fall down on this big fight night, but they stumbled.

★ Sunday, 17 November 2024