Updated November 21, 2024 at 16:53 PM ET
More than 100 million people tuned in last week to watch internet celebrity-turned-boxer Jake Paul take on boxing legend Mike Tyson.
The bout generated major buzz and had some hoping for a nostalgic dose of a Tyson knockout.
But when it came time to actually watch the ultimately underwhelming fight, many fans were booted from the stream or experienced long buffering times. The disappointment over the tech issues was evident from screenshots shared on social media. One Florida man has even gone as far as filing a class action lawsuit against the streaming service.
With Netflix scheduled to stream two live Christmas Day NFL games and more and more live events headed to other streaming services, it raised a question: Is the internet ready to handle them?
Morning Edition's A Martínez spoke to Michael Smith, a professor of information technology and policy at Carnegie Mellon University, who believes we should be optimistic about streaming's long-term foray into live events.
Why is it difficult to stream events like the Tyson-Paul fight to hundreds of millions of people?
Smith said the internet was designed for point-to-point communication, while broadcast channels were designed for multipoint communication.
TV broadcasters, for example, transmit one signal via one shared channel to all TVs in their coverage area. Streaming services, in contrast, require a dedicated channel every time someone connects online to play an episode of a show, movie or live sports event.
"So we're trying to get the internet to do something it wasn't really designed to do," Smith said.
On the night of the fight, some 85,000 viewers reported on the website Down Detector that they were having Netflix streaming problems, the Associated Press reports. Down Detector tracks website outages and user issues. When NPR reached out to Netflix for comment, the company emailed a response saying its team worked to stabilize streaming issues for most customers and that it supported 65 million concurrent streams at peak viewing.
"This unprecedented scale created many technical challenges, which the launch team tackled brilliantly by prioritizing stability of the stream for the majority of viewers," Netflix's Chief Technology Officer Elizabeth Stone said in a message to employees reported by Bloomberg. "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."
Would it be possible to stream the Super Bowl online for everyone instead of on cable or satellite?
Probably not today, Smith says, but technology is progressing.
He pointed to issues HBO faced in 2014, when Game of Thrones was nearing peak popularity. Fans trying to stream the season four premiere on HBO Go overwhelmed the app, causing it to crash.
He's not concerned, though, that streams will crash for Thursday's Pittsburgh Steelers-Cleveland Browns NFL game, which is set to stream on Amazon Prime. That's because streaming technology overall has simply gotten better in the past decade.
"So we've moved from 10 million being the problem to 100 million being the problem in 10 years," Smith said. "I think we're going to get even better over the next 10 years."
What can a service like Netflix do to improve streaming for future live events that might get hundreds of millions of views?
NPR also asked Netflix how it was preparing for the two upcoming NFL Christmas Day games. A spokesperson said via email that the company feels it has the infrastructure it needs to prepare for the two games and that it is working to optimize its systems and add more capacity to make improvements using what it learned from the Tyson-Paul fight issues.
The company said it is also working with internet service provider partners to grow its interconnection capabilities.
"Netflix right now has got to be working on their server capacity and their intermediate buffering nodes to make them ready for these two NFL games," Smith said. "I think it's going to turn out just fine."
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