When Amazon Prime Video became an exclusive partner with the NFL in 2022 — the first time a streaming service received a full, exclusive package of NFL games — the buzzword in the sports media industry was “proof of concept.” Though Amazon had worked with NFL Network and Fox on “Thursday Night Football” starting in 2017, one of the biggest questions the streamer faced when it started its 11-year run as the exclusive broadcaster of TNF was whether it could handle the audience load. Would the streaming hold up? Would the product look and feel like an NFL broadcast? You can disagree on the choice of broadcasters, graphics, music — these are all subjective things. But what is not subjective is accessibility.
Amazon Prime Video’s NFL debut in September 2022 — an exciting 27-24 win for the Kansas City Chiefs over the Los Angeles Chargers — was a mix of beautiful images and mild anger over tech issues that dissipated very quickly through the opening weeks of the season. Sure, the broadcasters might have pushed hard to sell the audience the 20-year-old Mazda regarding the schedule, but the company passed the proof-of-concept test. My former colleague Bill Shea captured that opening broadcast, and today we don’t see discussions about buffering or tech issues about Amazon’s NFL presentation. Latency can be problematic for live sports if the stream is more than a few seconds behind the real-time action, but Amazon has been very good here.
This was all front of mind Friday as Netflix aired multiple hours of pro boxing from AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. Jake Paul and Mike Tyson were the headline act, and it was not a great moment for sporting excellence. The Paul-Tyson bout was horrible, and so was the streaming experience for many viewers. As my colleague Tess DeMeyer chronicled, viewers were plagued by frequent bouts of buffering and freezing. There were technical issues in the broadcast, with Evander Holyfield’s earpiece and Jerry Jones’ microphone malfunctioning during separate interviews. (As wryly noted on X by Fox Sports president of insights and analytics Mike Mulvihill, there was great irony in Jones’ praising Netflix’s future with the NFL as viewers experienced tech issues.)
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Streaming issues of course vary depending on multiple factors, including internet connectivity. But there were loads of viewers who experienced problems Friday night, including The Athletic’s own media writer, Andrew Marchand, who updated his followers on Bluesky on the error message he was receiving.
Netflix has over 280 million subscribers in more than 190 countries including Canada, where I watched from Friday night. I struggled to get access to the streamer for a couple of minutes before the sensational Amanda Serrano-Katie Taylor bout (Serrano was robbed, it says here) and had moments of buffering throughout; I was clean for the whole Tyson-Paul event. Social media was lit with complaints. (The website Down Detector noted nearly 85,000 viewers logged problems with outages or streaming leading up to the fight, per the CBC.) It’s the worst kind of publicity for Netflix, which declined to comment. An NFL spokesperson had not responded as of publication.
This isn’t the first live sports rodeo for Netflix. It aired an F1-golf crossover event last November and a tennis match between Carlos Alcaraz and Rafael Nadal in March. Those were successful. What was a disaster was the live reunion in April 2023 to the conclusion of the fourth season of the reality dating show “Love Is Blind,” when users were unable to access the stream. Netflix issued an apology to viewers and an apology during an earnings call.
But the big one for Netflix is coming Christmas Day, given it landed exclusive rights to stream two NFL games — the Chiefs against the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Baltimore Ravens versus the Houston Texans. The three-season deal also includes a game on Christmas Day in 2025 and 2026. The game production will not be an issue as CBS is handling that, and the NFL Network is charged with pregame, halftime and postgame coverage. Neither of those entities has a role in transmission and streaming; that’s on Netflix, and it’s under six weeks until kickoff.
The Tyson-Paul fight was ultimately sports entertainment. Even Netflix’s recent deal with WWE — paying more than $5 billion for exclusive rights to the long-running “Raw” franchise, along with other rights outside the U.S. — could be tagged as sports-adjacent given WWE falls under sports entertainment. But the NFL matters to those that fuel weekly sports consumption in North America, and these matchups would easily draw more than 25-plus million on a traditional outlet in the United States. The NFL desperately wants Netflix to work as a partner because Netflix represents a multiple-decade ATM for it. Netflix needs it to work because it sees advertising as part of its long-term ambition for sustainable earning sources, and live sports can be a driver there. The NFL has an international slate of games it can easily turn into a future media rights package, and you know it wants Netflix at the table for that. Netflix executives announced this week they had sold out of advertising inventory for the games. It’s a big deal in the sports business world.
The NFL wants to put on a show far more entertaining than Tyson-Paul, and you can be sure Friday night spooked league officials a bit. Given the trajectory of the four teams playing Christmas Day, the games are shaping up to be of serious consequence for playoff seeding. There is money and reputation at stake, and you don’t get a second chance at a first impression. Both entities will be crushed by NFL fans if Christmas brings buffering and dropped streams.
(Photo: Al Bello / Getty Images)