50 million watched co-main event Taylor v Serrano

Paul v Tyson Netflix

Netflix experienced streaming issues as 65 million people tuned in to watch Jake Paul’s victory over Mike Tyson on Saturday. 

50 million were watching the co-main event, where Katie Taylor defeated Amanda Serrano for a second time, with an average of over 60 million households watching the event. However, while these audience numbers have been described as, “record-breaking,” by Netflix, there have been complaints from viewers about issues with buffering, freezing, and audio during the fights - with commentators apologising for the problems during the event.

Netflix is yet to comment on the technical issues, while Paul saw this as a good sign after the bout, saying, “We crashed the site,” and, “This is the biggest event.”

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman posted on X claiming that he had seen an internal Netflix memo from Netflix CTO Elizabeth Stone to employees, which stated: “This unprecedented scale created many technical challenges, which the launch team tackled brilliantly by prioritizing stability of the stream for the majority of viewers.

“I’m sure many of you have seen the chatter in the press and on social media about the quality issues.

“We don’t want to dismiss the poor experience of some members, and know we have room for improvement, but still consider this event a huge success.”

This wasn’t the first time that Netflix has live streamed an event, with the platform previously showing a golf tournament featuring Full Swing and Drive To Survive athletes, a hot dog eating contest between Joey Chestnut and Takeru Kobayashi, and more. However, the audiences for those were smaller than Paul v Tyson, and for one, the Love Is Blind Reunion, it also experienced a glitch - which in that case delayed the live stream.

CTO of streaming technology business Quickplay, Juan Martin, noted in a blog post that, “It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong with Netflix’s live streaming event from an outside perspective, but here are a few things we do know. They are working to adapt an architecture that was originally designed and optimized for VOD, not live streaming. As they evolve the platform, issues may only become apparent until  the platform is under stress. This was the case in 2023 during their first major live event, the Love Is Blind Reunion, when a software bug went undetected, leading to the cancellation of the live stream.

“We also know they rely on a single, proprietary CDN (Open Connect) and, when caches run out and traffic faces constraints in the peering network, there’s no fallback. If combined with higher-than-anticipated peak traffic, some ISPs may not be able to access the content and impact the end-user experience.”

Netflix’s next high profile live streaming event will be two NFL games on Christmas Day, Houston Texans v Baltimore Ravens and Kansas City Chiefs v Pittsburgh Steelers, and it recently announced that Beyonce will be playing the half time show for the first of those matches. In addition, live WWE will be available on the platform from 2025.