The NFL is standing by Netflix as the home of its Christmas Day slate of games, even after technical issues marred the streamer’s broadcast of the Jake Paul–Mike Tyson fight on Friday night.
While the issues have been making headlines since the highly anticipated bout, Front Office Sports reported that the league remains confident that Netflix will be up for the challenge when it airs Chiefs-Steelers and Ravens-Texans next month.
The NFL was clearly watching how the Paul-Tyson fight, which was taking place inside the Cowboys’ home in Arlington, Texas, went and how Netflix handled the whole event’s broadcast.
Buffering issues and outages plagued the night for viewers, which prompted the NFL to open up a renewed dialog with Netflix over the technical infrastructure that it has.
“There were clearly a lot of emails and calls flying around over the weekend,” a source told the outlet. “What happened was definitely noted, and there were conversations.”
Netflix’s CTO Elizabeth Stone acknowledged the shortcomings of the broadcast in a company memo noting that the “unprecedented scale created many technical challenges.”
The FOS report noted that the NFL did have some relief knowing that Netflix’s first big foray into live sports programming came separate from the NFL.
This year will mark the first year of a three-year deal that the NFL signed with Netflix for the streaming service to broadcast a game on Christmas Day.
The company will carry two this year before broadcasting one game a piece in 2025 and 2026.
Netflix is diving headfirst into live sports programming over the next several weeks, with the Paul-Tyson fight making its first big step followed by the two NFL games on Christmas and then taking over as the home of WWE’s “Monday Night Raw” in January.
WWE announced last January that they had inked a $5 billion deal to make the streaming service the Raw franchise’s home for the next 10 years.
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