Cricket has dominated streaming records up till now. But if the Jake Paul vs Mike Tyson fight broke the internet, how will it fare when Netflix adds Beyoncé to the Christmas Day NFL menu?
It’s fair to say that the Jake Paul vs Mike Tyson boxing match at the weekend didn’t go too smoothly for everyone. Socials were awash with people complaining about buffering, dropped connections, and lousy picture quality to the sort of levels not seen since Game of Thrones decided to film Season 8 Episode 3, The Long Night in the middle of a Northern Irish winter.
The problem is that Netflix says 60 million households round the world tuned in for the ‘fight' (we use the word advisedly) watching it via 65 million concurrent streams and the company's systems simply couldn’t cope. It says it then had to “prioritise the stability of the stream for the majority of viewers,” according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
65 million watching one single thing is peanuts for broadcast transmission, not so much for streaming. These aren’t wholly unprecedented numbers, however. The religious fervour that attends the Indian cricket team in its home country saw 59 million viewers stream the Cricket World Cup 2023 final last year held at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad. Australia failed to read the script and won the match, otherwise the figure might well have been higher.
The Indian men’s cricket team has broken 40 million streams concurrent four times in the past year. Indeed, you have to go all the way down to 30.6 million streams before you find a non-cricket event; Riot Games saying that the 2021 League of Legends World Championship finals drew an average minute audience of 30.6 million viewers.
Now a celebrity boxing match tops the list, but it probably won’t be there for long. Netflix has been looking at encroaching into the live sports streaming arena for a while now and had already snagged the high profile rights for the NFL’s two Christmas Day marquee games: The Super Bowl LVII-winning Kansas City Chiefs vs the Pittsburgh Steelers followed by the Baltimore Ravens vs the Houston Texans.
This was already going to be a big deal and the company’s engineers will have been looking at its infrastructure with a certain amount of nervousness. So, what does Netflix do? It adds Beyoncé to the bill and says she will perform at halftime during the Ravens match.
Netflix has 84.8 million subscribers in the US and Canada, and it was unlikely that viewership for either of the two games would have beaten the Paul vs. Tyson record. And despite decades of trying, the NFL outside the US is still a niche sport and you would not get too many tuning in over and above their normal domestic offerings. Add in a live Beyoncé gig though, with surprise special guests and all the fun jeopardy of watching a live event, and you have something that might well be watched around the globe.
Add in people trying to grab a glimpse of Taylor Swift at boyfriend Travis Kelce’s Kansas City Chief’s game and it’s fair to say that a lot of people will be working over Christmas at Netflix. The result is that the NFL may very well take the all-comers concurrent streaming record, albeit with an assist from big-name pop royalty. It's just that if India get through to the finals of the T20 Cricket World Cup in India in 2026, it might not keep it for long…
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