ED MORRISSEY: Netflix Loses In Technical Knock-Out.

If you tried to watch it, and you weren’t able to, because of technical chaos and buffering standstills with the Netflix stream—instead of writing an angry letter to the clearly overburdened IT department, you might want to thank them for sparing your eyeballs, and perhaps, your soul.

As for the rest of us: what were we thinking? Actually, I know what we were thinking: this seems like a terrible idea—58-year-old Mike Tyson entering the ring against a beefy 27-year-old social media imp. Surely I have better things to do with my time.

And yet there we were, watching at an uncommon hour, as many millions surely did, as if history hasn’t repeatedly shown that well-intentioned humans are often capable of making the same, regrettable decision.

Of course they are. They also tune in to watch the Dallas Cowboys at AT&T Stadium in Arlington Texas, the venue for this fight. At least those games have some promise of drama, though. Tyson hasn’t fought in nineteen years prior to last night, which is still more recent than the Cowboys’ last division-round playoff win (1995). What did anyone expect from a fight between a 27-year-old current champion and a long-retired has-been?

A lot, apparently. Enough people tuned into the stream to knock it out, which is more than either boxer could do in the ring. The New York Times reports that “tens of thousands of Netflix users” complained about the stream, but that was just those on Twitter/X. Did anyone see the fight without interruption?

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This lack of infrastructure investment for an event as heavily promoted as this is inexcusable. Netflix shelled out tens of millions for what turned out to be Dancing With the Boxing Stars and did nothing to ensure its subscribers could watch the routines. Will those viewers trust Netflix to provide a stable streaming experience for their next live event after this? Will they trust Netflix to provide a stable streaming experience for any service after this, or start looking for that from their competition?

Amazon Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football presentations have seemed much more viewable this year in terms of picture quality. At times last season, they could look like a TV signal being beamed in from the Soviet Union or East Germany. But clearly, the technology for streaming platforms to cover live events is very different and much more complex than that required to host lots of old movies on a server farm.