Last month, Netflix and Most Valuable Promotions presented a boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson to consumers around the world. With the 282.7 million subscribers of the Netflix streaming service, 70 million of which are members of its advertising-supported tier, the company conveyed that it broke several records for a live-streamed sporting event. The Paul-Tyson fight, it divulged, was the most-streamed sporting event ever with a peak of 65 million concurrent streams, along with an average minute audience of 108 million live viewers globally. Yet throughout the match, there were several latency issues with the stream, causing reductions in video quality, audio and buffering.
As the fight was taking place, consumers expressed their frustrations on social media about the inconsistency as it pertained to the stream. There was also purported concern from media professionals about whether or not Netflix would be able to handle broadcasting two National Football League games on Christmas Day. The company signed a three-year deal with the league earlier in the year to present contests annually on the holiday, its first foray into live NFL game broadcasts. NFL games represented 94 of the top 100 television programs last year, and the most recent Super Bowl attained a record-setting audience averaging 123.7 million viewers, according to data from Nielsen Media Research.
With more streaming and technology companies becoming involved in live game broadcasts, viewers are familiarizing themselves with changes to the longstanding paradigm. Al Michaels, the play-by-play announcer for Thursday Night Football on Amazon’s Prime Video for the last three years, discussed the concern surrounding these potential games during a recent appearance on CNBC Squawk Box, elucidating that these issues would be fixed.
“We had our problems at Prime in the first year too, and we got it under control,” Michaels said. “So I do know that everybody was complaining about the quality of picture and buffering, etc., etc., but I think they’ll get it right, and they’ll probably get it right by Christmas Day – at least the National Football League’s going to make sure they get it right by Christmas Day.”
Michaels explained that despite the confluence of media platforms in the current ecosystem, people have been able to locate where the events are being televised. It is something he thinks about as he sees the college games listed on the Saturday morning newspaper, but he has evinced that consumers are able to discover what they want to watch. Michaels added that the ratings prove people know where to find the games, with Amazon recently reporting an average of 13.51 million viewers for its Black Friday Football broadcast, representative of a 41% YoY increase.
“Obviously in today’s world, you can figure out where to go to get what you need to get to, but it’s not the way it was,” Michaels said. “It’s so funny because I keep using that phrase once in a while when a game gets good, ‘Don’t touch that dial,’ and there’s no such thing as a dial anymore, as far as I know, so ‘Don’t log off’ or whatever you’re supposed to say in these days, but look, everybody seems to know where to find stuff, and they’re finding it, clearly.”
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