Netflix co-CEO says Tyson vs. Paul viewership was ‘off the charts,’ despite streaming issues
Netflix co-CEO says Tyson vs. Paul viewership was ‘off the charts,’ despite streaming issues
Ted Sarandos didn’t have many apologies to make about the livestream of the boxing match, despite myriad technical issues.
The Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson live boxing match on Netflix in November showed both the potential and the limits of live sports streaming. The limits were rather glaring; specifically, the stream of the fight was either glitchy or non-accessible to hundreds of thousands of viewers around the world. One outraged customer is even suing over the quality of the stream, but Netflix’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos was sanguine about not only the fight but about the company’s future live streaming prospects when discussing it at the UBS Global Media & Communications Conference on Monday.
Key Details:
- Sarandos told listeners that the fight was “off the charts,” and touted” the “Super Bowl audience” it drew.
- He also said Netflix had a team “reengineering the entire internet” for fight night.
- The potential for more live events from the streamer in the future is high.
In his remarks about the Paul vs. Tyson fight, Sarandos briefly mentioned the bad experience that many viewers had while trying to watch, while also saying the event was “off the charts.” He said the streamer “hate[s] to disappoint a member for one second,” but immediately launched into an explanation based on the incredible ratings Netflix drew for the match.
“The real thing is we had an enormous live audience, 108 million people watching live,” Sarandos said. “You’d have to go back to the ’80s to get a live audience that big that wasn’t a Super Bowl. It’s really phenomenal. It’s a Super Bowl-like audience that we were able to draw for this fight.”
The co-CEO went to great lengths to explain how much of a technical achievement it was for Netflix to deliver a live event to so many people at a single time and wasn’t afraid to employ hyperbole to get his message across.
“We were pushing every [internet service provider] in the world right to the limits of their own capacity,” he said. “We were stressing the limits of the internet itself that night. So we had a control room up in Silicon Valley that was reengineering the entire internet to keep it up during this fight because of the unprecedented demand that was happening.”
Other Netflix executives have been a bit more candid when discussing the problems encountered during the attempt to stream the fight. The company's chief technology officer acknowledged that fight night was a “poor experience” for many subscribers, but Sarandos made it sound as if it’s full steam ahead for Netflix in terms of more live events.
“We’re going to do it more frequently,” he said in reference to more live events. “’[WWE Raw]’ is going to be live every Monday night. Starting in January, we have John Mulaney, which is going to be a live show that’s going to also run next year. But we also think that there’s plenty of others to do.”
Netflix has already reassured WWE officials that when it begins airing weekly streams of “WWE Raw” in January, its live streaming tech will be up to the task. NFL executives have been similarly assuaged regarding the pair of games Netflix will air live on Christmas Day, but all the reassurance in the world won’t help the streamer if it fumbles that event as well.
Sarandos struck an incredibly confident tone about the future of live streaming on Netflix. The audience draw for the Paul vs. Tyson fight is undeniably impressive, but the streamer has to make sure its ducks are in a row if it wants to maintain a sterling reputation among streaming audiences when offering live events.
Netflix
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