There are frivolous lawsuits, and then there’s this.
Per court documents obtained by TMZ Sports on Tuesday, an individual named Ronald “Blue” Denton has filed a class-action lawsuit in the state of Florida claiming Netflix breached its contract by failing to provide a watchable stream of the Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul fight on Friday evening.
As has been widely documented, the fight suffered from extensive buffering and accessibility issues. The lawsuit claims users “were faced with legendary problems, including: no access, streaming glitches, and buffering issues.”
Denton is asking for unspecified damages in his lawsuit.
“This unprecedented scale created many technical challenges, which the launch team tackled brilliantly by prioritizing stability of the stream for the majority of viewers,” Netflix CTO Elizabeth Stone said in a statement following the bout. “I’m sure many of you have seen the chatter in the press and on social media about the quality issues. We don’t want to dismiss the poor experience of some members, and know we have room for improvement, but still consider this event a huge success.”
Netflix claims that the fight averaged 60 million viewers worldwide, though that figure was not measured by a third-party firm like Nielsen and thus should be taken with a grain of salt. The streamer also claims that 108 million people watched at least one minute of the fight.
With a pair of NFL Christmas Day games and its media rights deal with WWE Raw on the horizon, Netflix will have to get its ducks in a row, or face more scrutiny.
However, it’s unlikely that this lawsuit is more than a vanity project for Mr. Denton. We’ll see if this thing has any staying power.
About Drew Lerner
Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.