NFL, celebrity boxing, and hot dogs: Netflix’s push into live TV

Despite widespread issues with video quality and buffering, Netflix’s live-streamed Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul boxing match brought in an average of 108 million viewers, based on TVision data in the US and first-party data in global markets. With 65 million concurrent streams, Netflix says the fight was the “most-streamed global sporting event ever.”

Of those simultaneous streams, 38 million were from households in the US, and the TVision data says it accounted for 56 percent of TV viewing between midnight and 1AM that day.

The Paul / Tyson fight on Friday was very popular. Netflix streamed it into more than 60 million households, which is a huge number for any TV event, much less a streaming-only one. Whether the whole thing went well, though, is another matter. The fight itself wasn’t very exciting, and for a large portion of the audience it wouldn’t have mattered if it was — all they could see was laggy, pixelated nothingness. Netflix is clearly bought in to live programming and sports, but is it ready to do it big?

On this episode of The Vergecast, The Verge’s Richard Lawler joins the show to talk through the state of sports streaming. We talk about the ups and downs of the Netflix live-streaming experiments so far, what’s at stake for the company’s first NFL games this Christmas, and the technical challenges for any streaming service trying to do live at scale. Turns out decades of digging trenches and hanging wires have given the cable networks some advantages.

It was morbid curiosity that made me tune in to Netflix’s live boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson on Friday night. The stream ran into technical issues, and the fight itself was slow and ponderous. But there was something else that kept me watching: all of the jokes flying on Bluesky.

That kind of real-time social experience is a large part of what made X feel so vital back when it was still called Twitter. Whether it was the World Cup or a presidential election or a Nintendo Direct, having so many people posting in one place made it feel alive, an experience that Meta’s Threads, with its algorithmic feed, hasn’t been able to replicate. But at least for a brief moment, Bluesky sure did.

Netflix is trying to carve a slice of the live entertainment market, and it’s enlisting help from Beyoncé. The Houston-born singer will perform in her hometown on December 25th, headlining the halftime show for the Texans-Ravens NFL matchup as part of Netflix’s Christmas Gameday live show.

Beyoncé’s performance will take place in the second of two NFL games that Netflix is streaming on Christmas Day, the first being between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Pittsburgh Steelers. The star is set to perform songs from Cowboy Carter live for the first time and “is expected to bring along some special guests” that are featured on the album, according to Netflix’s announcement. The games mark Netflix’s NFL streaming debut after securing a three-year deal in May that includes “at least one holiday game each year” in 2025 and 2026.

Netflix’s broadcast of the Mike Tyson and Jake Paul boxing match was a mess. I’m not talking about the fight itself — although people had their qualms with that, too — it’s the livestream, which people across the internet complained was plagued by buffering, unstable, and unwatchable muddiness.

That doesn’t bode well for Netflix’s live sports ambitions, especially its upcoming Christmas Day NFL games.

Netflix is looking to bolster its live offerings with some chicken wings. Bloomberg and Variety report that Netflix is in talks with BuzzFeed about streaming live versions of the popular YouTube show “Hot Ones,” which features famous people eating spicy wings while being interviewed by host Sean Evans. Netflix and BuzzFeed want to make a deal this month, according to Bloomberg.

Netflix and BuzzFeed declined to comment.

Netflix is continuing its push into live events, this time with a comedy special from Joe Rogan. Called “Burn the Boats,” the event will stream live from San Antonio, Texas, on August 3rd at 10PM ET. Netflix says this will be Rogan’s first comedy special in six years, and it will be the podcaster and former Fear Factor host’s third with the streamer; he previously released two taped events in 2016 and 2018.

The announcement is notable in particular as Netflix continues to make live events a major part of its service. Previously, that has included comedy specials from Chris Rock and John Mulaney, and last year, the company became a player in live sports. So far, it has signed broadcast deals with the NFL and WWE and will also livestream boxing and competitive eating.

Anne Aaron just can’t help herself.

Aaron, Netflix’s senior encoding technology director, was watching the company’s livestream of the Screen Actors Guild Awards earlier this year. And while the rest of the world marveled at all those celebrities and their glitzy outfits sparkling in a sea of flashing cameras, Aaron’s mind immediately started to analyze all the associated visual challenges Netflix’s encoding tech would have to tackle. “Oh my gosh, this content is going to be so hard to encode,” she recalled thinking when I recently interviewed her in Netflix’s office in Los Gatos, California.

Netflix has scheduled Chestnut vs. Kobayashi: Unfinished Beef on September 2nd as another one of its live events, along with Christmas Day NFL games, WWE Monday Night Raw, and the delayed Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight.

A press release from Netflix takes the whole thing very seriously, quoting Kobayashi saying, “Retiring for me will only happen after I take him down one last time... Competing against Joey live on Netflix means fans all over the world can watch me knock him out.” Chestnut, meanwhile, says, “It’s time to give the people what they want!”

Netflix is increasingly getting into live events, with comedy specials, NFL games, and even the WWE, but live action means unpredictability, and today, the streamer announced that a planned July 20th boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson is being rescheduled. While Tyson recovers from an ulcer flare-up that required medical attention during a recent flight, he has been advised to do “minimal to light training” over the next few weeks.

Due to the interrupted training schedule for the officially sanctioned fight — Tyson’s first since 2005 —they’re now planning on a date later this year, which Netflix said will be announced by the end of next week.

Netflix isn’t just programming content only a small group of people would like — it’s intent on having a little something for everyone. During an interview with The New York Times, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos says he regrets comparing Netflix to HBO and its more limited selection of content in the past.

Here’s the quote, published in this 2013 GQ profile of Reed Hastings:

Just 11 months ago, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said the streamer was “super excited about the success of our sports-adjacent programming,” but it’s going from adjacent to all in now, announcing a new three-year deal with the NFL to stream Christmas Day games.

After the announcement, Netflix revealed that this year’s games will feature Kansas City taking on the Steelers and the Ravens against the Texans.

Netflix’s foray into sports is going in a new direction. Today, the streamer announced that its next major event will be a fight between YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul and former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson that will stream live on Netflix. The bout will take place on July 20th at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.

The move is part of a steady expansion into sports from Netflix. So far, that has meant going all in on sports documentaries — including a doc about Paul’s fledgling boxing career — as well as a handful of live events featuring golf and tennis. But two headline (if controversial) names duking it out in an NFL stadium that seats 80,000 marks arguably the biggest bet from the company yet. (And it comes at a time when other broadcasters have largely gotten out of boxing.)

This last weekend I was sitting in a hotel room in Memphis, staring out at the parking lot turned ice skating rink, wanting to just have a couple of hours with my brain turned off. I opened Netflix hoping to find a movie that would give me an evening’s respite. Scrolling down to the top 10, I was met with a who’s who of the 2010s and 2020s. Cowboy & Aliens, the 2011 flop with a great cast, was on the list. Queenpins, the 2021 flop with a great cast, was also there. At the top of the list was The Legend of Tarzan, a 2016 flop with a great cast. Rounding out the top 10 was a Sylvester Stallone flick from 2019 and a handful of new releases I’d heard nothing about until I saw them in the top 10 list.

In a highly competitive streaming market where every streaming service is fighting for your limited dollars, it feels like a not great thing that Netflix’s top 10 list could be mistaken for the lineup at TNT. But it also feels like that might be Netflix’s plan. Just today, it announced it was going to be the new official home of one of basic cable’s crown jewels: WWE Monday Night Raw. And yesterday, the company announced the departure of Scott Stuber, who oversaw Netflix film’s three consecutive years as the most nominated film studio at the Academy Awards.

Netflix has dabbled in live broadcasts over the last year or so, and now the company has announced a long-term deal with the WWE to broadcast its headline weekly show, Monday Night Raw, starting next year. This is the first time Monday Night Raw, which broadcasts live every week, is leaving traditional linear television, as it has been the No. 1 rated program on NBCUniversal’s USA Network, and it has tie-ins to NBCU’s streaming platform, Peacock.

The deal is even more comprehensive outside of the US, where Netflix is also obtaining the rights to WWE shows like SmackDown and NXT, plus monthly premium live events like WrestleMania, SummerSlam, and the Royal Rumble. NBCUniversal’s Peacock service still has the rights locked up for those premium live events in the US — at least for now. Netflix’s deal for Raw covers “the US, Canada, UK, and Latin America, among other territories, with additional countries and regions to be added over time.”

Netflix is planning yet another live sports event — and this time, it’s a tennis match pitting veteran tennis player Rafael Nadal against Carlos Alcaraz, who’s currently ranked number two in the world.

The streamer is calling the event The Netflix Slam, and it will air on March 3rd, 2024 from the Michelob Ultra Arena at Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. While it seems Spanish tennis champs Nadal and Alcaraz will headline the competition, Netflix says it’s going to announce “additional players and matchups” at a later date. The stream will air as a dual broadcast for both English and Spanish-speaking markets.

Netflix’s first live sporting event is here — and it involves a golf tournament between athletes from the streamer’s Full Swing and Formula 1: Drive to Survive shows. The competition, called The Netflix Cup, will air live on the service on November 14th at 6PM ET / 3PM PT.

The tournament will take place at Wynn Golf Club in Las Vegas, featuring the Formula 1 drivers Alex Albon (Williams Racing), Pierre Gasly (BWT Alpine F1 Team), Lando Norris (McLaren Racing), and Carlos Sainz Jr. (Scuderia Ferrari) along with PGA Tour golfers Rickie Fowler, Max Homa, Collin Morikawa, and Justin Thomas.

There seems to be a lot of focus on streaming live sports, but based on comments from Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, it appears the company plans to largely stay out of that game for the moment. “We really think that we can have a really strong offering for sports fans on Netflix without having to be part of the difficulty of the economic model of live sports licensing,” he said during the company’s second quarter earnings call on Wednesday.

That quote was the final part of a longer response about the company’s sports strategy. “We’re super excited about the success of our sports-adjacent programming,” he said, pointing to recent titles like Quarterback and Tour de France: Unchained. With the latter, he talked about how it did “exactly what we saw with Drive to Survive, which is introduce a brand new audience to a sport that’s been around for a really long time and [is] not very well understood. You do that through exceptional storytelling, not through the live-ness of the game.”

Netflix’s first live-streamed sporting event could be coming this fall. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company is in talks to create a new, celebrity-driven golf tournament in Las Vegas that would include some of the stars of other sports content on the service like Drive to Survive and Full Swing. (Disclosure: Vox Media Studios produced Full Swing, and The Verge recently produced a series with Netflix.)

The talks are apparently early, but a custom, talent-driven golf tournament makes perfect sense as Netflix’s first foray into sports streaming. Streaming live sports is high-stakes, hard, and expensive, and the deals for big-name events are ever more cutthroat. (Netflix was reportedly trying to wrest Formula 1 coverage away from ESPN, but failed to do so.) There’s a reason that ESPN’s first-ever broadcast was of a slow-pitch softball game, and that Yahoo broadcast a London NFL game in the wee hours of the American morning before trying anything more complicated. And even those more conservative attempts don’t always go well.

Netflix ran into significant issues with its second-ever live event on Sunday evening. Love Is Blind: The Live Reunion failed to start streaming at its planned 8PM showtime, leading to major consternation from the show’s fans across social media. Netflix acknowledged the problem on Twitter soon after and promised to kick off the presentation within 15 minutes.

That didn’t happen, either. More than an hour later, subscribers were still encountering error screens when trying to watch the event. Netflix followed up by saying it’d be “worth the wait.” As the delay stretched on, hosts Vanessa and Nick Lachey posted to Instagram thanking fans (and a live studio audience) for their extended patience.