Netflix's Jake Paul-Mike Tyson streaming issues raise Christmas concerns for the NFL

When Amazon Prime Video became an exclusive partner of the NFL in 2022 — the first time a streaming service received a full, exclusive package of NFL games — the buzzword in the sports media industry was “proof of concept.” Although Amazon had partnered with NFL Network and Fox on “Thursday Night Football” beginning in 2017, one of the biggest questions facing the streamer as it began its 11-year run as TNF's exclusive broadcaster was whether it could increase the amount audience could handle. Would streaming hold up? Would the product look and feel like an NFL broadcast? You can disagree about the choice of broadcasters, graphics, music – these are all subjective things. But what is not subjective is accessibility.

Amazon Prime Video's NFL debut in September 2022 – a thrilling 27-24 win for the Kansas City Chiefs over the Los Angeles Chargers – was a mix of beautiful visuals and mild anger over technical issues that quickly surfaced during the opening weeks of the season. disappeared. Sure, the broadcasters may have pushed hard to sell the public on the 20-year-old Mazda regarding the schedule, but the company passed the proof-of-concept test. My former colleague Bill Shea captured that opening broadcast and today we see no discussions about buffering or technical issues surrounding Amazon's NFL presentation. Latency can be problematic for live sports if the stream lags more than a few seconds behind the real-time action, but Amazon has been very good here.

This was all on display Friday when Netflix broadcast several hours of pro boxing from AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. Jake Paul and Mike Tyson were the headline act, and it wasn't a great moment for sporting excellence. The Paul vs. Tyson fight was terrible, as was the streaming experience for many viewers. As my colleague Tess DeMeyer wrote, viewers were plagued by frequent bouts of buffering and freezing. There were technical problems on air, with Evander Holyfield's earpiece and Jerry Jones' microphone malfunctioning during separate interviews. (If wryly noted on X by Fox Sports president of insights and analytics Mike Mulvihill, there was great irony in the way Jones praised Netflix's future with the NFL as viewers experienced technical difficulties.)

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Streaming issues obviously vary depending on several factors, including internet connection. But there were many viewers who experienced problems on Friday evening, among other things The Athletics's own media writer, Andrew Marchand, who updated his followers on Bluesky on the error message he received.

Netflix has over 280 million subscribers in more than 190 countries, including Canada, which I was watching as of Friday evening. I had trouble accessing the streamer for a few minutes before the sensational fight between Amanda Serrano and Katie Taylor (Serrano was robbed, says here) and had moments of buffering the entire time; I was clean the entire Tyson-Paul event. Social media was full of complaints. (According to the website Down Detector, the CBC reported that nearly 85,000 viewers had registered issues with outages or streaming in the lead-up to the fight.) It's the worst kind of publicity for Netflix, which declined to comment. An NFL spokesperson had not responded by time of publication.

This isn't the first live sports rodeo for Netflix. An F1 Golf crossover event was broadcast last November a tennis match between Carlos Alcaraz and Rafael Nadal in March. They were successful. What was a disaster was the live reunion in April 2023 until the end of the fourth season of the reality dating show 'Love Is Blind', when users could no longer access the stream. Netflix has apologized to viewers and a apology during an earnings call.

But the big one for Netflix comes on Christmas Day, as it has acquired the exclusive rights to stream two NFL games: the Chiefs vs. the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Baltimore Ravens vs. the Houston Texans. The three-season deal also includes a Christmas Day game in 2025 and 2026. Production of the game won't be an issue as CBS is handling that, and the NFL Network is in charge of pre-, halftime and post-game coverage . None of these entities play a role in transmission and streaming; that's on Netflix, and it's less than six weeks until kickoff.

The Tyson vs. Paul fight was ultimately sports entertainment. Even Netflix's recent deal with WWE — which paid more than $5 billion for the exclusive rights to the long-running “Raw” franchise, along with other rights outside the U.S. — could be labeled sports-adjacent, since WWE falls under sports entertainment . But the NFL matters to those who fuel North America's weekly sports consumption, and these games could easily gross more than $25 million at a traditional outlet in the United States. The NFL desperately wants Netflix to work as a partner because Netflix has represented an ATM for that for decades. Netflix needs it to work because it sees advertising as part of its long-term ambition for sustainable revenue streams, and live sports can be a driving force behind that. The NFL has an international slate of games that could easily be turned into a future media rights package, and you know they want Netflix at the table for that. Netflix executives announced this week that they had run out of ad inventory for the games. It's a big problem in the sports business world.

The NFL wants to put on a show that's way more entertaining than Tyson-Paul, and you can bet that Friday night league officials were a little scared. Given the trajectory of the four teams playing on Christmas Day, the games will have serious implications for play-off seeding. Money and reputation are at stake, and you don't get a second chance at a first impression. Both entities will be crushed by NFL fans if Christmas brings buffering and dropped streams.

(Photo: Al Bello/Getty Images)