Between near-constant lag issues and a, shall we say, too intimate peek into Mike Tyson’s locker room routine, Netflix’s first foray into live sports could hardly have gone much worse with the Tyson-Jake Paul fight. The debacle left plenty of people wanting their money back, and plenty more wondering how the streaming giant would possibly handle its NFL doubleheader on Christmas Day without plenty of the same issues arising.
Netflix will be responsible for both the Kansas City Chiefs-Pittsburgh Steelers game at 1 p.m. ET on Wednesday and the Baltimore Ravens-Houston Texans matchup at 4:30 p.m. ET. The streamer and the league have had over a month now to iron out the issues that propped up during the Tyson-Paul bout, but it doesn’t sound like they thought anything was wrong in the first place.
NFL appears unaware it’s headed for Netflix Christmas Day disaster
Asked about how it feels about where Netflix’s capabilities are at ahead of some of the league’s biggest games of the entire regular season, NFL EVP of media distribution Hans Schroeder’s response … didn’t inspire a ton of confidence.
“I think they have done an incredible job with all their preparations, every piece of what they’re putting in place,” Schroeder told reporters on Wednesday.
“I think there were some bumps certainly with Netflix, but everything we’ve seen, we think their plan and the work we’re doing alongside them, we’re incredibly confident in and we feel incredibly well prepared for a great day on Christmas Day for our fans, and fans not only here but around the world, so we’re really excited about that.”
That sure sounds like both the league and Netflix are simply crossing their fingers and hoping that the second time is the charm. The fact that Schroeder can’t point to a single tangible difference between the Tyson-Paul fight and Wednesday’s games doesn’t bode well, and Netflix itself is just fully sticking its head in the sand.
“We were pushing … every ISP in the world, of their own capacity,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos told The Hollywood Reporter. “We were stressing the limits of the internet itself that night. So, we had a control room up in Silicon Valley that was re-engineering the entire internet to keep it during this fight because of the unprecedented demand that was happening.”
Sarandos’ big solution to what went wrong back in November? Hey, you should be thankful that things weren’t even worse. Not what NFL fans want to hear as the NFL gets ready to sacrifice its game experience for as much money as possible.
