If you stayed up past midnight ET to watch Paul vs. Tyson, you know a lot
more people than expected tuned -in, as NFLX had bandwidth issues. Over the
weekend, Netflix reported 60M global households watched the event, with viewership
peaking at 65M peak concurrent streams, highlighting NFLX’s ability to generate
viewership, suggesting the company will be successful with advertising around live
events. Assuming 2.5 viewers per household implies 150M viewers, compares to
124M for the 2024 Super Bowl, the highest viewership for any US broadcast,
(though comparing global vs. US). Alternatively, the most-watched boxing/UFC
events reached 4.6M/2.4M via Pay-per-view.
Netflix also announced this week that its ad-tier recently surpassed 70M MAU, +75%
since May, approaching critical scale for advertisers. The next live event will be the
upcoming Christmas Day NFL games: Chiefs vs. Steelers & Ravens vs. Texans.
While the press will focus on the technical bandwidth issues and customer complaints,
our guess is that viewing was likely ~2x internal expectations, a high quality problem
than can be easily fixed by Christmas Day.
