Netflix’s Tyson-Paul Failures Raise Huge NFL Game Questions

If I’m Netflix and the NFL, I’m going to a DEFCON 1 state of urgency after the disaster that was the Mike Tyson–Jake Paul boxing match Friday night.

Let’s start with the good news: Paul said an amazing 120 million worldwide streamed the event online from AT&T Stadium. That’s a testament to the enduring appeal of Tyson and the sweet science. On Saturday afternoon, the media and technology company said its total audience count peaked at 65 million concurrent viewers. For context, last season’s NFC championship game between the 49ers and Lions had an average viewership of 53.6 million (over a much longer period) and peaked at 59 million.

But to call Netflix’s production a train wreck would be an insult to trains. Netflix’s glitchy stream was plagued by buffering issues, freezes, long lag times, and poor screen quality. The stream lost audio at times and was slow to reload. Viewers were livid and had every right to be. There were more than 88,000 reports of streaming problems, according to the website Downdetector. 

In short, Netflix’s biggest live sporting event was a technical flop. That doesn’t bode well for the giant streamer’s upcoming showing of two NFL games on Christmas Day, including the back-to-back Super Bowl champion Chiefs vs. the Steelers. Not to mention its upcoming coverage of WWE’s Raw starting in January.

That was just the technical issues.

On a commentary level, the team of play-by-play announcer Mauro Ranallo, boxer Roy Jones Jr., and actress Rosie Perez added little to the production. Before the main event, Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis joined Kate Scott for an interview. But Holyfield couldn’t hear Scott’s questions. So Lewis had to comically relay them to the former champ to get his answers. Naturally, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was on hand for an interview from Jerry World. But Jones’s mic didn’t work. That’s entertainment. Oh, did we mention Netflix also gave us a nice shot of 58-year-old Tyson’s butt cheeks from the dressing room?

When Netflix’s social media team gamely tried to gauge fan reactions on X (Twitter still to some) they were ratioed into oblivion by the 283 million worldwide Netflix subscribers in 190 countries who, thankfully, didn’t have to pay extra to watch.

“How about instead of tweeting you fix the stream?” asked one frustrated viewer.  “It seems that Netflix is failing miserably in their first live-streaming sports event. My images are grainy with frequent freezes and buffering. Even as I delayed the broadcast several seconds, the image still seems as if it is coming over a dial-up line,” wrote another. “You would have thought servers would have been your first investment,” tweeted a third.

Despite Tyson slapping Paul at the weigh-in, and Paul’s blood-curdling threats of revenge, the fight itself was a snoozer. It was more of an exhibition, with neither fighter really trying to hurt the other. Paul admitted he took his foot off the gas in Round 3 at the post-fight press conference. “I wanted to give the fans a show, but I didn’t want to hurt someone that didn’t need to be hurt,” he said. 

In the shadowy world of pro boxing, there’s usually a winner and a loser (unless they call it a draw to get you to pay for another pay-per-view). Here are my winners and losers from Friday night.

Winners

• Amazon Prime Video: Somewhere Jay Marine, Prime’s sports boss, is yukking it up with Jeff Bezos. While Netflix is getting creamed, Prime is enjoying its most successful season so far with the NFL’s Thursday Night Football. Prime’s stream of Eagles vs. Commanders on Thursday averaged 14.42 million viewers, up 11% from last season’s comparable game. Through 10 games this season, Prime is averaging 13.20 million viewers, up 7% from the same point last season. Prime seems to have largely solved the buffering and lagging issues that make the streaming experience inferior to linear television. If Netflix is serious about getting into the NFL game, they’re well behind Prime.
• Mike Tyson: The boxing legend collected a cool $20 million for going the eight-round distance, while hardly throwing a punch. More importantly, Tyson had his biggest pop culture moment since his hilarious cameo in the 2009 comedy The Hangover. With his propensity to say anything (witness his jaw-dropping interview with a 14-year-old reporter), Iron Mike will be in major demand. 
• X/Twitter: Elon Musk must have a big smile on his face this morning too. With Netflix experiencing technical issues, millions of fans turned to his social media platform to follow the fight card. 

Losers

• Netflix: Memo to Netflix: It’s later than you think. The streaming giant must fix its technical issues before showing two NFL games on Christmas Day. If Netflix’s livestream glitches while Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes is leading a game-winning drive, NFL fans will go nuts. It will be the modern-day equivalent of the infamous “Heidi Game” in 1968 when NBC broke away from the Raiders’ comeback win over the Jets to show a movie about an adorable Swiss orphan. The Raiders scored two touchdowns in the final minute to beat the Jets 43–32. But NFL viewers on the East Coast were left in the dark. Outraged football fans bombarded the NBC switchboards.
• Jake Paul: Yes, the 27-year-old star won a unanimous decision. Yes, he stands to collect an eye-popping $40 million. But Paul isn’t getting any plaudits as a boxer for carrying a senior citizen who hadn’t fought professionally in 19 years. As ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith tweeted: “Now it’s time for @jakepaul to get in the ring with a Top-10 fighter — or Hell, a Champion. No more BBall players, strikers from MMA, or old men. It’s time for Jake to get into a real fight. He’s good enough! Make it happen.” UFC boss Dana White had a similar opinion, saying Paul’s MO is to fight “old” undersized fighters: “Jake Paul can fight. It’s not like Jake Paul can’t fight. Jake Paul just won’t fight anybody.”
• Boxing: What can I say? They got me again. I can’t tell you how many times this chronically corrupt sport got me and my brothers to shell out money in the 1980s and ’90s to watch pricey pay-per-view fights with Tyson, Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, Tommy Hearns, and Roberto Durán—only to ruin our experience with crooked officiating.

The best thing I can say about Friday night is I didn’t have to pay extra. As Magic Johnson put it on X/Twitter: “This fight tonight was not great for boxing.”