On November 15th Netflix streamed the fight between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson, the next morning all that could be heard was how awful of a job Netflix did streaming the fight to 60 million households.
The fight was the biggest live streaming event Netflix has ever attempted and fell short of glory. Even though they had 60 million households watching, almost everyone that was watching the fight had to deal with grainy images, buffering, and some people even losing connection to the stream. This led to many unhappy people sharing their thoughts about the fight on many different social media platforms, with popular content creators even creating joke videos about the fight buffering.
Netflix is set to stream two NFL games on Christmas Day this year and many people are worried if it will have the same outcome as the Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul fight. These two NFL games will be the Kansas City Chiefs vs. the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Baltimore Ravens vs. the Houston Texans. These are both big time matchup with all teams competing for playoff positions due to it being the second to last week of the regular season. This is making lots of fans nervous, because they don’t want their team’s game to have problems streaming.
Netflix’s CTO released a statement about the technical problems that occurred, but said that the Netflix team did a great job fixing the problems. Many others would argue otherwise after it affected the majority of those who watched the fight, as proven by the number of people who stated the connection issues were far from pleasing.
When asking students at Lower Dauphin who watched the fight if they had streaming issues they had some interesting answers. Junior Ethan Tanner says, “Netflix popped up with a loading screen at 25% and it wouldn’t work.” Another Junior J.T. Tylwalk says, “Yeah it kept saying 25% and seemed like it would never load… So if Netflix doesn’t learn what to fix there’s going to be a lot of unhappy fans on Christmas.”
Netflix has roughly a month to figure out what they are going to do to make sure that they keep people happy on Christmas Day when they go to stream their favorite team’s game. If the company doesn’t figure this issue out soon, they risk losing customers and creating a bad reputation for themselves.
