Netflix’s Ted Sarandos on Jake Paul-Mike Tyson Glitches: “We Were Stressing the Limits of the Internet Itself”
Despite the technical glitches, Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos called the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight “off the charts.”
The fight, which streamed live on Netflix Nov. 15, was plagued by screen buffering and freezing issues for some users. Speaking during the UBS conference in New York Tuesday, Sarandos pointed to the tech challenge of streaming to an “enormous live audience” of 108 million globally people watching live for a five-and-a-half hour streaming event.
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“We were pushing the [internet service provider], every ISP in the world, right to the limits of their own capacity. We were stressing the limits of the internet itself that night,” Sarandos said. “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.”
“It’s really phenomenal. It’s a Super Bowl-like audience that we were able to draw for this fight. This is a combination of our content team recognizing that this was going to be a thing, our marketing and publicity teams and our social media teams and everybody making it a thing that you are not going to miss, no matter where you were in the world,” he continued.
“A lot of records were set that night for a company that basically broke down during the ‘Love Is Blind’ reunion about a year and a half before that. So that’s a lot of positive trajectory in a very short amount of time,” Sarandos added.
Netflix has more live events coming up, including the NFL Christmas Day Games, WWE Raw live every Monday night starting in January, as well as an upcoming live show with John Mulaney.
Overall, Sarandos said the company is interested in doing “big scale live events” more frequently. In regards to the upcoming Christmas Day Games and the halftime performance by Beyoncé, Sarandos said the programming will be themed to the holiday.
“It is Christmas Day. So you will be aware that it is Christmas Day, the show and the broadcast itself, and all the entertainment that’s wrapped around it will all be very special and very unique, and I think, bigger than the game itself,” he said.
Live events like the NFL Games and WWE also have attracted “a lot of demand” for advertising, Sarandos noted, adding that Netflix “severely undersold the Paul-Tyson match.” (“If we knew the audience would be that big, we probably would have done a lot more selling on that fight,” he quipped.)
Sarandos said Netflix does not have other sports properties in mind at the moment for live streaming, but that it would need to be something that is “unique” and that the company can make into an event, rather than a typical season or game.
Netflix’s proposition to the properties is that it can bring in a global and younger audience, Sarandos said. WWE fit into the idea, Sarandos said, adding that every week of programming feels like “a big event.”
“We also liked it because for a sport, it also has a 40-person writer room, so it’s much closer to our current wheelhouse of creating and storytelling,” he said.
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