This past Friday, all eyes were locked on Netflix as it staged the latest return for 58-year-old Mike Tyson to a boxing ring opposite influencer-turned-boxer Jake Paul.
The global spectacle was in line with Netflix’s strategy toward sport, which has softened after introducing its ad tier and showing the media buying community the scope of numbers it can attract for live programming.
Netflix has edged closer to live programming through this year’s Tom Brady roast, a hot dog-eating contest between Joey Chestnut and Kobayashi, the securing of two NFL games for Christmas Day, and the pending arrival of WWE programming in 2025.
There have been negatives along the way, such as the infamous Love is Blind reunion in April 2023, which failed to air in real-time and pushed the streamer to tape and release the following day. However, this is Netflix, and their resources have allowed for live-streaming disasters to become mere hiccups rather than fatal.
Friday’s fight was not a message that Netflix was entering the boxing business, rather, it was entering the Jake Paul business with the best possible opponent for mass appeal and an enigma among sports fans that crosses generations.
Bolstered by a three-episode countdown series on the streamer and a tremendous final week of promotion, Paul vs. Tyson felt like a major event by Friday afternoon and possessed the key to any successful event of its type – “What is going to happen?”
The strongest promotions for fights pose the questions that the fight will answer and leave the audience needing to see the outcome and somehow, this one achieved that. Whether it was Mike Tyson being able to turn back the clock and land one power shot at his advanced age, Jake Paul suffering a humiliating defeat, or watching a car crash in front of 70,000+ people, this was the promotional DNA of Friday’s contest.
Regardless of the quality of the fight presented (and it was low), the bigger story coming out was the ability of Netflix to handle the volume for such a massive live event. This was where criticism and complaints infiltrated everyone’s timeline on Friday as streaming issues bogged down so many.
The Netflix and Most Valuable Promotions press release touts 60 million households tuning in during the main event with a peak of 65 million worldwide. If these numbers are accurate, this should make this fight one of, if not the most-watched of all time given the global accessibility of Netflix and the elimination of a pay-per-view barrier (minus your subscription).
However, while the outlets are promoting the trending figures for the fight, many of those taking to X on Friday were doing so out of frustration and complaining over a litany of issues.
It was not a minor aspect of Friday’s story as it persisted for hours including users receiving a pixeled video, slow motion movement, or their device crashing altogether. I encountered these issues for well over an hour after logging in before the Katie Taylor vs. Amanda Serrano fight, so this wasn’t even near the peak viewing period. After multiple device changes, and countless crashes, I finally got a steady stream for the back half of the main event on my phone, but it was an agonizing experience.
Here is a summary of yesterday’s #NetflixOutage that led to over 1 million reports across 50 different countries in #Downdetector🚨
The U.S. led the way with over 530,000 reports peaking at approximately 11:00PM EST prior to the main event. pic.twitter.com/JyftPcsONK
— Downdetector (@downdetector) November 16, 2024
Some users didn’t experience these problems, but the number of complaints was enough to generate news coverage focusing on the streaming rather than the fight.
In the long run, is this going to be a killer for Netflix? Hardly. The next test is Christmas Day with a pair of NFL games and a huge volume day for live programming. I cannot fathom the worldwide level of interest for those games as compared to this fight but there will be a massive concentration of North American users logging in simultaneously.
Was this a win for Netflix? On the positive side, it shows advertisers how big an event can become when it cuts through to the public, and streaming issues aside, we’re likely talking more than 110 million people watching an event globally and will make advertisers salivate while further incentivizing Netflix to prepare itself for this level of concurrent traffic.
WWE fans may have heard of the horror stories from Friday and concerned themselves with Raw’s migration to the service but there is no episode of WWE programming (and I would include premium live events for worldwide users) that is going to approach the Tyson vs. Paul level. But it’s a stark reminder that with so much live sports content moving to streaming, there is still a reliability factor that has yet to be quelled for the largest events and that’s not an issue for broadcast and cable where no one is fretting whether the Super Bowl will be a seamless broadcast.
Back to the fight, and other figures released (again, by Netflix and MVP) include attendance of 72,500 at Texas’ AT&T Stadium and a gate of $18 million and 6,000 bars & restaurants carrying the fight.
The attendance figure puts into perspective how preposterous the 2016 number announced by WWE for WrestleMania 32 was at 101,763 (turnstile count: 80,709).
The gate figure would top every UFC gate in history except the Sphere event from this past September of $21.8 million. That doesn’t consider inflation as Conor McGregor did two gates above $17 million in 2016 and 2018.
Conventional thinking would assume that Netflix will take the business success of this show and revisit the right boxing fight in the future, however, diving into the deep end and staging regular boxing cards on the streaming service doesn’t seem to be their strategy today. Jake Paul seems much better suited for this type of event-like spectacle for the streamer, but he needs the right opponent and Mike Tyson is ‘one of one’, which can’t be replicated with any other living boxing legends.
While the notion of Tyson fighting again seems ludicrous after watching Friday’s fight and even worse once hearing about his health situation over the summer, nothing should be assumed. Tyson stated as much after the fight that he isn’t shutting the door on fighting and if he came back in a year, he could likely talk up a return for Logan Paul or someone of that level.
The story going into Friday’s card was Mike Tyson but the larger one coming out is Netflix and how its goals are in line with transforming big event consumption.
Technical issues were a nightmare on Friday and it’s an evolving process but in this day and age, the most valued commodity is someone’s time and when a user feels that theirs is wasted or taken for granted, it is awfully hard to restore that confidence but when you’re the most dominant player in the field, Netflix is going to be given chance after chance to restore that confidence.