Is streaming ready for major sporting events?

LOS ANGELES – Mike Tyson’s much-hyped fight against YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul showed Netflix’s potential power to host live global sporting events via streaming video. However, for many people it also highlighted the limits of technology.

Thousands of Netflix users reported technical difficulties trying to watch the fight. Frustrated viewers struggled with buffering and blurry video as a result of tens of millions of households trying to watch the fight at the same time. Something like this, if the event had been broadcast on a traditional network, would have resulted in angry calls to cable companies.

Live sports is considered one of the great opportunities for streamers, including Netflix, which need a mass audience to satisfy advertisers. Companies like Amazon and Apple are spending big, driving up the price of live sports rights and pushing even further into competition from legacy network rivals.

But sport is also a challenge for technology companies. Even without buffering or grainy feeds, live streams tend to be laggy compared to cable and satellite broadcasts, meaning streaming viewers risk seeing spoilers on social media if the events are broadcast simultaneously.

There’s a lot at stake for Netflix. The company will host its first live NFL games on Christmas, including one with a halftime show from Beyoncé. Netflix is ​​also preparing to air WWE’s pro wrestling franchise “Raw” starting next year.

Brandon Riegg, Netflix vice president of factual series and sports, said he has “full confidence” in the company’s engineering team, which learned a lot from the live Paul vs. Tyson game and will adapt ahead of the NFL games. Netflix said it worked quickly to stabilize viewership for the majority of its subscribers during the boxing event in which 27-year-old Paul defeated 58-year-old Tyson.

“We were overwhelmed in the sense of expectation — it far exceeded our expectations in terms of the number of people who came to the fight,” Riegg told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s that simple. As much as we predicted how many people would come, a lot more people came. It’s impossible for our engineering team to test this level of traffic and viewership unless they have a real live thing, and that’s exactly what happened.”

On the bright side, Netflix has shown that it can be a big draw for sports fans, with an average of 108 million live viewers watching the fight worldwide. According to Netflix, there were 65 million simultaneous live streams and called it the “most streamed global sporting event of all time.”

Industry observers believe the day is approaching when streamers can make their own bid to host the Super Bowl on their platforms, as long as they can handle the traffic.

“Once they demonstrate their ability to deliver a consistent, robust, premium experience for these events that consumers have come to expect, I have no doubt we will succeed,” said Rob Rosenberg, a former Showtime Networks executive and founder of New York-based Telluride Legal Strategies.