6 days Ago By David Richards
Stutter vision and the need for constant refreshes plagued Netflix, during the recent Mike Tyson versus Jake Paul mega fight, which was supposed to have been watched by over 250 million people. Australia viewers had to constantly refresh the feed as one of the biggest streaming events in the company’s history went to air. Even US media complained with Digital Trends claiming “If tonight’s performance is any indication of what Netflix’s sports streaming will look like, then the company is in trouble.
From the start, the live stream has been hit with severe technical glitches, loss of sound, and very slow feeds during reload attempts”. Social media erupted with complaints as fans reported experiencing frequent buffering during the live event. The technical problems left many frustrated and unable to access the fight.
Netflix has yet to issue a statement addressing the disruptions. A visit to Downdetector revealed the extend of the problem with a flood of complaints. In Australia consumers have got use to the high-quality AFL and NRL feeds from both Foxtel and Kayo, with International streamers who are weighing up bidding for the global contract for the Olympics still trying to work out how to deliver a quality global feed.
The glitch-filled performance suggests that Netflix successfully drew a large audience to stream the fight. But this isn’t the first time that Netflix’s streaming capabilities have been severely strained during a live broadcast. Fans on social media have been extremely vocal with their displeasure in recent months with the US company using technology that is supposed to read a households capability, depending on Broadband feed and router in an effort to eliminate stutter vision or as was the case with the Tyson fight no vision as the feed struggled to handle the global bit rate feed.
The poor showing of Netflix’s coverage of the fight calls into question Netflix’s ability to pivot to live sports, including this year’s NFL Christmas games claims US media. There is also speculation that the NRL are approaching overseas streamers such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and Paramount in an effort to have “Someone with more money than the free to air networks to bid up against Foxtel” said one observer. “Let’s hope that doesn’t happen” they said.
And while WWE wrestling is not a sport, Netflix has also committed a large amount of money to begin streaming WWE Raw beginning in January 2025. That “sports entertainment” broadcast is regularly two to three hours long and doesn’t have these kinds of problems on USA Network. If Netflix can’t figure out its live-streaming issues before Raw premieres, then the backlash from tonight’s Paul versus Tyson fight will pale in comparison claims Digital Trends.
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