Netflix’s stream of Friday night’s boxing match between social media influencer turned boxer Jake Paul and former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson could best be described as problematic.
At worst — and probably more accurately — it could be described as a complete disaster.
The broadcast began at 8 p.m. Eastern. It did not take long for issues to be reported.
This is awful and ruining boxing
— JobberNationTV: THE REALITY CHECK FOR THE IWC (@JobberNationTV) November 16, 2024
Nonstop buffering
— JaguarGator9 (@JaguarGator9NFL) November 16, 2024
— Matt Pauley 🎙️ (@MattPauleyOnAir) November 16, 2024
But while there were early issues, they weren’t universal. Pixelation issues were generally resolved quickly. Buffering issues were also generally solved within a few moments. Or, at the most, viewers only had to hop out and come back in for things to straighten out. That wasn’t the case for everybody, of course. But for the most part, things were OK early. That didn’t last.
As the night progressed and more people began to log on as we got closer to the main event, the issues were glaring — and persistent.
Some more issues have come about over the last (roughly) 10 minutes https://t.co/SoinQDYLXO pic.twitter.com/bdHTtaJvkc
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) November 16, 2024
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) November 16, 2024
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) November 16, 2024
Not great. I’m getting where the picture freezes but the audio continues. Has to go out and go back in to catch up
— Robert Littal BSO (@BSO) November 16, 2024
Quite the spike of outage reports! pic.twitter.com/BWmp9YbWlD
— @SoonerMedic@infosec.exchange (@soonermedic72) November 16, 2024
The issue has the potential to go well beyond Friday night’s poor stream.
If the streaming problems are this prevalent on Friday night, what will they be in January when Netflix becomes the permanent home of WWE’s flagship show, Monday Night Raw? Or, more notably, what will the issues be on Christmas Day when Netflix streams a pair of NFL games?
Just got kicked off Netflix’s live feed on the undercard for Jake Paul/Mike Tyson fight for the third time. They better work out the technology kinks if they expect to regularly offers live sports like the NFL and WWE.
— Eric Deggans at NPR (@Deggans) November 16, 2024
If Netflix broadcasted NFL games… pic.twitter.com/jHC9zST3WT
— NFL Memes (@NFL_Memes) November 16, 2024
Netflix is finding out in real time how hard it is to produce live TV.
They need to get these Mic issues fixed before the NFL broadcast’s on Christmas.
— Emmanuel Acho (@EmmanuelAcho) November 16, 2024
To further hammer that point even more, there were streaming issues, as well as issues with the broadcast, as Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was talking about how excited he was that Netflix and the NFL are partnering up.
Jerry Jones saying Netflix is a huge part of the NFL’s future into a mic that doesn’t work and then less than a minute later the stream goes down.
— Michael Mulvihill (@mulvihill79) November 16, 2024
Also of note, this is not the first streaming issue that Netflix has had. Does that mean that Monday Night Raw and the NFL streams will be plagued with issues? It doesn’t bode well but not necessarily. We’ve seen streaming services like Prime Video and Peacock largely fix issues they had early into their time streaming live sports. Netflix certainly can fix these problems. Whether it will fix them is another issue. If nothing else, Friday night showed everyone how glaring the issues were.
And if they aren’t fixed by December 25, it will be anything but a Merry Christmas for Netflix.