Netflix, the streaming service that has raised its rates repeatedly over the past year, joked about the massive buffering issues it experienced during the airing of the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight.
Because it was funny to air a completely unwatchable product … or something. Social media went insane during the fight, with nearly everybody across all platforms complaining about the buffering and pixelization issues plaguing the broadcast.
Some of your favorite sports writers were reduced to watching the fight on a three-inch phone screen. Very uncool.
Be honest, how many times did you have to pause the event and go back into ‘watch live’ during the 8 rounds of boxing? Personally, a conservative estimate – 20 times in our house.
Rather than addressing the issue and promising to improve their systems, Netflix issued a statement with a rather infuriating joke about the problem.
“The boxing mega-event dominated social media, shattered records, and even had our buffering systems on the ropes,” they wrote on Instagram.
Netflix Has No Remorse
Yeah, they shattered records, all right. As quite possibly the worst broadcast fumble in sports history. NBC’s airing of the ‘Heidi Bowl’ thinks this whole production was ridiculous.
BroBible reports that “90,000 people complained about the stream going down at some point.”
That’s a lowball number, considering you have to have taken the time to report the issue with DownDetector.com. Multiply that by quite a bit for a more realistic number.
And Netflix seems content with their overall numbers, not the quality of the product.
“While the press will focus on the technical bandwidth issues and customer complaints, our guess is that viewing was likely ~2x internal expectations, a high-quality problem than can be easily fixed by Christmas Day,” Oppenheimer head of internal research Jason Helfstein said Netflix’s performance rating.
Ha ha, viewers! Who cares that you couldn’t actually watch the fight? As long as you were logged in, the numbers look good for our bottom line. The joke’s on you.
RELATED: Fight Night Is Upon Us: Here Are Mike Tyson’s 5 Most Devastating Knockouts
Howard Stern Warns Them – Fix The Problem Before Football
Howard Stern told his Sirius XM listeners that Netflix had better get their act together before the service attempts to stream two big NFL games on Christmas Day.
“People are pissed,” he said. “You […] with people’s football, there is hell to pay. You better not. I don’t know how this stuff works, but you’ve got to make sure it works.”
Even the non-sports fans know the NFL and Netflix are under A LOT of pressure. pic.twitter.com/W1WJOhmbaH
— Jimmy Traina (@JimmyTraina) November 18, 2024
It seems unlikely the over-priced streaming service will learn from the buffering debacle.
CTO Elizabeth Stone’s internal email to employees reveals they’re all patting themselves on the back.
“This unprecedented scale created many technical challenges, which the launch team tackled brilliantly by prioritizing stability of the stream for the majority of viewers,” Stone wrote.
“I’m sure many of you have seen the chatter in the press and on social media about the quality issues,” she added. “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.”
That is literally dismissing the poor experience and unrepentant.
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