6 days Ago
Last night saw the biggest combat sporting event of the year reach its conclusion as Mike Tyson fought his first pro boxing bout in decades against YouTube star Jake Paul. While there were plenty of complaints, Netflix got what they wanted: Numbers. On Saturday, Netflix announced that a whopping 60 million households around the world tuned in to the eight-round boxing match.
The streaming service said its number peaked with 65 million concurrent streams. "NEWS: Netflix says 60 million households worldwide tuned in for its Mike Tyson vs Jake Paul boxing event Friday night. The giant streamer’s audience peaked at 65 million concurrent streams," Michael McCarthy of Front Office Sports posted on X.
NEWS: Netflix says 60 million households worldwide tuned in for its Mike Tyson vs Jake Paul boxing event Friday night. The giant streamer’s audience peaked at 65 million concurrent streams. But Netflix had a significant problem with its streaming function last night as countless fans reported outages as they were trying to watch the fight.
"Tuned in or attempted to tune in while they continued to getting error messages while waiting for video to load?" one user replied. "65 million concurrent steams that were buffering," wrote another. "Does it count as a stream if you were buffering 5-10 minutes for every 10-20 blurry seconds of the event you got to “watch”?" a third jokingly asked.
Brett Carlsen/Getty Images It's unclear to what extent the outages and errors may have impacted the viewership, if at all. But the problem led to a slew of criticisms in the hours after about whether Netflix is truly ready to enter the sports broadcasting sphere with such problems. Netflix has a deal in place with WWE set to go into action next year and will be broadcasting their first-ever NFL games this coming Christmas.
If Friday's broadcast of the Tyson-Paul fight was supposed to show that they're ready to join the likes of Amazon Prime Video and Peacock among the sports streaming platform heavyweights, they're off to a rough start. Related: Mike Tyson Reveals He Nearly Died Just Months Before Return To Boxing.
