We were stressing the limits of the Internet itself that night,” the streamer’s co-CEO tells UBS’ Media & Communications Conference
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said demand for its live boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson on Nov. 15 was “off the charts,” despite some of its subscribers facing technical difficulties during the stream.
“We hate to disappoint a member for one second. So yes, there was some of that,” Sarandos admitted at UBS’ Media & Communications Conference on Tuesday. “But the real thing is, we had an enormous live audience: 108 million people watching live. You’d have to go back to the ’80s to get a live audience that big. It’s a Super Bowl-like audience that we were able to draw for this fight.”
“We were stressing the limits of the Internet itself that night,” Sarandos added. “We had a control room up in Silicon Valley that was re-engineering the entire Internet to keep it up during this fight because of the unprecedented demand that was happening.”
Sarandos also noted that the Katie Taylor vs. Amanda Serrano fight attracted 50 million people in the U.S. and 74 million around the world.
“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,” he emphasized. “So that’s a lot of positive trajectory in a very short amount of time.”
The Tyson-Paul match was the latest live programming effort from Netflix as it looks to ramp up its advertising business.
In addition to that fight night, Netflix is gearing up for two live NFL games on Christmas Day as well as WWE’s “Monday Night Raw” starting in January 2025, which have attracted “a lot” of advertising demand, according to Sarandos.
