Netflix’s Jake Paul-Mike Tyson Fight Demand Was ‘Off the Charts’ Despite Tech Glitches, Ted Sarandos Says
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said demand for its live boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson on Nov. 15 was “off the charts” despite some of its subscribers facing technical difficulties during the stream.
“We hate to disappoint a member for one second. So yes, there was some of that,” Sarandos told UBS’ Media & Communications Conference on Tuesday. “But the real thing is, we had an enormous live audience: 108 million people watching live. You’d have to go back to the 80s to get a live audience that big. It’s a Super Bowl like audience that we were able to draw for this fight. This was a combination of our content team recognizing that this was going to be a thing, our marketing and publicity teams and our social media teams, and everybody making it a thing that you could not miss, no matter where you were in the world. And then there are builders in the tech teams that were able to deliver it, and they really made a show of it.”
He touted the match as the “largest streaming event in history” and “one of the largest live audiences in almost 40 years,” with around 50 million people in the U.S. and 74 million around the world tuning in.
“We were stressing the limits of the Internet itself that night,” Sarandos added. “We had a control room up in Silicon Valley that was re-engineering the entire Internet to keep it up during this during this fight because of the unprecedented demand that was happening.”
In addition to the Tyson-Paul fight, Netflix is gearing up for two live NFL games on Christmas Day as well as WWE’s “Monday Night Raw” starting in January.
“We’re really excited with the opportunity to get people very excited about coming together and watching something and talking about it. And I think those those moments are rare and very, very valuable. So that’s why we’re kind of leaning into [live events],” Sarandos said. “I don’t think a season of league sports – the economic challenges aside – every one of those nights is not necessarily an event, and really I want to focus on the live complexity and the live excitement on things that are truly events.”
While Netflix’s live events have been limited to the U.S. as it ramps up its capabilities, Sarandos said the goal is to eventually do “local to local streaming” more frequently.
More to come…
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