Netflix’s live fight between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul delivered big numbers for the streamer, but the volume of viewers also caused major issues with the stream throughout the event. Many viewers had to deal with frequent buffering throughout the night, while others weren’t able to watch the fight at all. That understandably caused many wrestling fans to wonder about WWE’s upcoming Raw on Netflix debut, which will happen in January of next year. During an interview on Greg and the Morning Buzz, Triple H addressed the streaming issues and those concerns about Raw upcoming premiere, and he’s taking things all in stride (H/T Fightful).
“I don’t want to flex about it, but it was buffering on my end because I was on a plane watching it. The buffering was expected on my side. We were flying back from TV watching the fight and the signal was wonky,” Triple H said. “I thought, we’re 40,000 feet in the air, it should be.”
“Then, seeing it online of everybody saying it was buffering. You start putting 60 million households all at once on a streaming service, if our first night buffers and they come and say there were 60-70 million households watching, I’ll be good with the buffering,” Triple H said.
Netflix will take over Monday Night Raw at the beginning of the new year, and it is a major shift into the realm of live programming or the streaming giant. Netflix has taken on several other live events, including comedy specials and roasts, but the Tyson vs Paul fight was clearly the biggest in scale, bringing in over 60 million viewers and reportedly hitting a peak of 65 million viewers. By comparison, the Tom Brady Roast hit a high of 1.8 million viewers.
[RELATED: Squid Game Operators Crash Netflix’s Tyson vs Paul Fight]
Unfortunately, that did bring with it issues, and Netflix did address those issues on X while also celebrating the viewership. On X Netflix wrote, “60 million households around the world tuned in live to watch Paul vs. Tyson! The boxing mega-event dominated social media, shattered records, and even had our buffering systems on the ropes.”
Mark Gurman of Bloomberg reported on an email from the Netflix CTO to employees regarding the streaming issues, and it also praised the scale and success of the event while also discussing the online discourse over the technical challenges throughout.
According to the report, the email read, “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.”
Hopefully, this isn’t a sign of things to come from Raw’s Netflix tenure, and Netflix will surely take some lessons from the fight to help make things less rocky when that debut comes.
Are you hopeful for Monday Night Raw’s Netflix debut? You can talk all things wrestling with me on Threads and Twitter @mattaguilarcb and on Bluesky @knightofoa!
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