If you watched the Mike Tyson versus Jake Paul match on Netflix last week, you know disappointment. I don't mean the fight. Sure, that was a snoozefest preceded by some truly compelling undercard fights. No, the disappointment was in Netflix, one of the best streaming services, which serves hundreds of millions of people every day but somehow succumbed to 65 million concurrent viewers with a deeply pixellated action, a frustrating spinning wheel, and sometimes no video service at all.
For those unaware, Netflix tried its hand at live sports last Friday, broadcasting a full card of pro-level fights over three hours and culminating in the highly anticipated bout between the 26-year-old Paul and the 58-year-old former champ Tyson. The fight went about how you would expect between someone in the prime of their youth and a boxer who retired almost 20 years ago. However, throughout the evening, Netflix became wildly unstable. I watched a good part of all the action and experienced numerous outages, as well as a fair amount of videos that looked like graphics from Mike Tyson's 1987 PunchOut! game for NES. At times, the throughput devolved into dial-up at best.
