• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, November 21, 2024

Netflix has been working through a schizophrenic business moment as a result of the Mike Tyson/Jake Paul boxing match.

A massive 65 million households globally watched the event with 108 million viewers -- in the midst of massive buffering and delay issues that flooded social-media platforms.

Big-time viewing success has its growing pains.

“This unprecedented scale created many technical challenges, which the launch team tackled brilliantly by prioritizing stability of the stream for the majority of viewers,” said Elizabeth Stone, chief technology officer of Netflix, in a company memo.

Downdetector says there were some 500,000 reports of technical snafus. In the aftermath, analysts are cringing with despair about upcoming sport events: Two major Christmas Day NFL games as well as the start of an expensive WWE series of events.

What would happen if those events were hit with the same outages?

This has happened before with Netflix. An unscripted entertainment dating show in its fourth season finale, “Love Is Blind,” also had buffering/technical issues in April 2023.

Netflix is already a “must have” among modern viewers who see the service as a quality platform.

As a comparison to top-rated sports content, Netflix looks favorable compared to Amazon Prime Video, which now regularly averages around 14 million to 15 million Nielsen-measured viewers for “Thursday Night Football.”

But Netflix shouldn’t get too full of itself. Howard Stern on Sirius Radio says if Netflix blows it with the NFL, there will be hell to pay. He’s right.

Early “TNF” games on Prime Video a year ago also had some glitches. Amazon worked through this, and Netflix needs to do the same.

The bottom line is that Netflix tech executives need to over-anticipate high demand, especially on a heavily sports-focused NFL weekend in the winter.

If there is trouble, consumers might have rough flashbacks of sorts. This is reminiscent of some cable TV network-aired live events in the early 1980s.

Everyone will be watching -- and maybe waiting for Netflix to drop an easy end-zone touchdown pass.