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Perhaps the biggest storyline to come out of the fight between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul was the inconsistency of Netflix’s stream. Social media was abuzz as viewers dealt with outages throughout the night.
Despite the disruptions, Netflix still reported 60 million households watched Friday night’s main event globally, with a peak of 65 million concurrent streams. The co-main event between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano averaged about 50 million viewers.
While the final viewership numbers will still be released in the coming days, the Tyson-Paul bout is expected to break live streaming records. The Taylor-Serrano fight will likely become the most-watched professional women’s sports event in U.S. history.
The user experience may have been faulty, but Netflix proved its point: In a world with a plethora of options for media consumption, and as households continue to cut the cord on the cable bundle, Netflix—which boasts 283 million subscribers—showed it can gather a global audience onto its platform for one event.
Advertisers will likely look at the viewership numbers, and the hold the event had over the sports world, as a significant positive indicator. The Super Bowl, which perennially secures over 100 million viewers in the U.S., will still be the grand event for advertising. But Friday’s fight (albeit in a much shorter time frame than a typical game) showed a streaming service behind a paywall can produce enormous numbers—higher than just about any other U.S. sporting event.
However, the leash for Netflix to fix its live stream won’t be long. The company has a little over a month before it streams an NFL Christmas Day doubleheader for the first time. This could be a pivotal litmus test for the streamer, particularly in the U.S., given the loyalty and fervor of NFL fans.
As Netflix has embraced live streaming and slowly secured the rights to larger events, however, it has shown signs of improvement. In April 2023, Netflix had a disastrous debut for its live stream of the reunion of reality TV show Love is Blind, but was able to avoid a similar situation for The Roast of Tom Brady in May. The latter was the 26th most-streamed show on Netflix in the first half of 2024, securing about 22.4 million views.
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