Perhaps the biggest storyline to come out of the fight between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul was the inconsistency of Netflix’s stream. Social media was abuzz as viewers dealt with outages throughout the night.

Despite the disruptions, Netflix still reported 60 million households watched Friday night’s main event globally, with a peak of 65 million concurrent streams. The co-main event between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano averaged about 50 million viewers.

While the final viewership numbers will still be released in the coming days, the Tyson-Paul bout is expected to break live streaming records. The Taylor-Serrano fight will likely become the most-watched professional women’s sports event in U.S. history.

The user experience may have been faulty, but Netflix proved its point: In a world with a plethora of options for media consumption, and as households continue to cut the cord on the cable bundle, Netflix—which boasts 283 million subscribers—showed it can gather a global audience onto its platform for one event.

Advertisers will likely look at the viewership numbers, and the hold the event had over the sports world, as a significant positive indicator. The Super Bowl, which perennially secures over 100 million viewers in the U.S., will still be the grand event for advertising. But Friday’s fight (albeit in a much shorter time frame than a typical game) showed a streaming service behind a paywall can produce enormous numbers—higher than just about any other U.S. sporting event.

However, the leash for Netflix to fix its live stream won’t be long. The company has a little over a month before it streams an NFL Christmas Day doubleheader for the first time. This could be a pivotal litmus test for the streamer, particularly in the U.S., given the loyalty and fervor of NFL fans.

As Netflix has embraced live streaming and slowly secured the rights to larger events, however, it has shown signs of improvement. In April 2023, Netflix had a disastrous debut for its live stream of the reunion of reality TV show Love is Blind, but was able to avoid a similar situation for The Roast of Tom Brady in May. The latter was the 26th most-streamed show on Netflix in the first half of 2024, securing about 22.4 million views. 

The Dallas Wings will select No. 1 in the 2025 WNBA Draft after winning Sunday’s draft lottery. 

There was a 45.4% chance for the Wings, who finished 9–31 last season, to walk away with the No. 1 pick, with 22.7% coming from their own pick and another 22.7% coming from the selection of the Chicago Sky, as Dallas owned a pick swap.

The second pick will be made by the Los Angeles Sparks, who would have held the best odds at 44.2%, if not for the pick swap. The Sky secured the third pick, and the Washington Mystics, who had just a 10.4% chance at the top pick, settled for the fourth pick. 

The Golden State Valkyries, the WNBA expansion franchise that debuts next season, hold the fifth overall pick.

The Paige Bueckers Draft

While the WNBA draft won’t take place until April, and follows a full NCAA women’s basketball season, the Wings are expected to select University of Connecticut star Paige Bueckers with the first pick. The 23-year-old can play both guard positions and would provide a needed boost for a Wings squad that has been searching for a backcourt mate for several years to complement star scorer Arike Ogunbowale.

It’s unlikely Bueckers can replicate the fanfare that followed Caitlin Clark, but she still projects as a massive draw for the WNBA and Dallas given her exciting play style, longevity in the spotlight, and the rise of the women’s game. She has already signed NIL deals with Nike and Gatorade, and is also the first college basketball player to secure equity in a professional basketball league after agreeing to a deal with Unrivaled in August.

Bueckers has a $1.4 million NIL valuation, according to On3, which is second among all NCAA women’s basketball players and 30th among all NCAA athletes. She has over five million followers across Instagram, TikTok, and X, more than any men’s football or basketball player.

Bueckers, a redshirt senior, is averaging 21.3 points, 4 assists, and 3 steals through three games to start the 2024–2025 NCAA campaign. She was the No. 1 recruit in the 2020 high school class, ahead of many of the top rookies from the 2024 WNBA draft class, including Clark, Angel Reese, and Cameron Brink. During her freshman year at UConn, Bueckers won the Wooden Award and the AP, Naismith and WSBWA National Player of the Year awards.

In the following years, however, she battled injuries and missed the entire 2022–2023 season due to an ACL tear. She was eligible to enter the 2024 WNBA draft, and was projected to be drafted in the lottery after Clark, but announced in February she would return to UConn.

Bueckers does still have another year of eligibility left due to injuries, and could stay in school through the 2025–26 season. But she is expected to declare for the upcoming draft.

Concerts have long been a crucial revenue stream for pro sports teams and facility operators, but the climactic end of Taylor Swift’s record-setting Eras Tour is taking on an even greater level of importance for Rogers Communications, which is now cornering the market on Canadian pro sports. 

Swift began on Thursday a six-concert run at the Rogers Centre in Toronto, and she will end the 21-month tour, which has grossed about $2 billion, with three shows next month at Vancouver’s BC Place.

There have been multiple intersections between Rogers’s sports holdings and the Swift shows. The company-owned Blue Jays proclaimed on social media they are now in their “Tayronto Era” as the club publicly celebrates the pop icon filling their home ballpark. 

The Blue Jays also have made the opportunity to purchase Eras Tour tickets available to Rogers Centre 200-level season-ticket holders who renew for the next two seasons. That two-year provision there elevates from similar sales incentives that many teams have used over the years in which a year of season-ticket purchasing is required to access tickets for coveted events such as an all-star game or playoffs.  

On a corporate level, Rogers is the presenting sponsor of the Canadian shows of the Eras Tour, operating a series of Swift-themed giveaways and also using the tie-in to tout its 5G mobile network. As prior shows on the Eras Tour have shown massive demand for mobile data by attending fans, Rogers also spent nearly $6 million ($8 million Canadian) on a 5G network upgrade at Rogers Centre—a move that will also benefit Blue Jays fans once the club returns for next season.

The efforts arrived soon after Rogers’s deal in September to acquire a controlling stake in Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, amplifying its claim as the most powerful team ownership entity in all of sports. 

What About Buffalo?

As the Swift shows in Toronto also pull in a significant number of fans traveling from western New York, there is a notable four-day gap between each half of Swift’s six concerts in Toronto, a period that would easily have allowed for the roughly 110-mile trip on Sunday afternoon to Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park, N.Y. Travis Kelce, boyfriend of Swift, and his Chiefs played the Bills that day in what is being billed as the NFL’s game of the year thus far. 

Swift, however, reportedly did not attend the game, which was anticipated to potentially set a new high for an NFL television audience during the 2024 regular season.