Jake Paul-Mike Tyson Fight’s “Must-See-Ness” Outweighed Tech Issues, Co-CEO Ted Sarandos Says

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Tue, 10 Dec 2024, 5:16 pm·2-min read

Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos described last month’s Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight as a triumph despite the live event’s technical glitches.

“We hate to disappoint a member for one second,” he said during an appearance at the UBS Media and Communications Conference in New York. Even though many tuning in wound up frustrated by buffering and sound issues with the live stream, Sarandos said the “must-see-ness” was “off the charts.” For employees at the company taking stock of the event, he said, “all that was left was imagination and what’s next.”

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While he didn’t dwell on the specific elements of the 5 1/2-hour livestream, Sarandos chuckled that it was “some combination of sports and circus,” capped by Paul’s victory by decision over the 58-year-old Tyson. “They really made a show of it,” Sarandos added, referring to the company’s programming and marketing teams. He said he “heard a lot of great stories,” including one about a high school football game where “everybody in the stands was watching the fight on their phone instead of watching their kids play football.”

Concerns have arisen in sports, media and tech circles since the fight about Netflix’s technical capabilities heading into a Christmas Day doubleheader of NFL games. The audience for those games, even with a Beyoncé halftime show, is likely to be smaller than the 60 million households the company said watched the fight. Still, the stakes will not be low.

Sarandos didn’t directly address questions swirling about the company’s handling of the NFL, but instead emphasized progress to date. Considering that “we basically broke down” during the season finale of Love is Blind in April 2023, the company’s live events business has achieved “a lot of positive trajectory in a very short period of time,” the exec said.

Streaming live for five-plus hours for tens of millions of concurrent viewers “required expertise across every function that we have,” Sarandos said. “We were stressing our own technology,” he said. “We were stressing the limitations of the internet itself that night.” At a control room in Silicon Valley, workers were “re-engineering the entire internet to keep it up during the fight because of the unprecedented demand that was happening.”

Asked whether the results of the fight have stoked any internal appetite for broader sports rights licensing, Sarandos said full seasons of live sports tend to have more uneven appeal than more specialized, singular attractions. “Not every game is an event,” he said. “The economic challenge

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