Netflix had a Friday night to remember. And to forget.
The NFL reportedly is standing firm with the streaming giant after a live boxing event that attracted plenty of viewers — but that left plenty of them disappointed in the experience.
Via Eric Fisher, the NFL “still has confidence” in Netflix’s ability to deliver a pair of Christmas Day games (Chiefs-Steelers and Ravens-Texans) despite the widespread slowdowns, outages, and/or grainy images from the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight.
The NFL has 150 million reasons to do so. That’s the fee Netflix is paying for the two games.
The issues nevertheless caused the league to ask again about the “technical infrastructure” at Netflix. There’s also a sense of relief that the problem happened now, putting Netflix on notice of the issues that need to be fixed within the next 37 days.
Sam Neumann of AwfulAnnouncing.com has obtained an internal Netflix email that seemed to reluctantly acknowledge the problems.
“This unprecedented scale created many technical challenges, which the launch team tackled brilliantly by prioritizing stability of the stream for the majority of viewers,” the memo reportedly said. “I’m sure many of you have seen the chatter in the press and on social media about the quality issues. We don’t want to dismiss the poor experience of some members, and know we have room for improvement, but still consider this event a huge success.”
Some members? It feels like most if not all members who tried to watch the fight encountered something less than the no-different-from-TV with which millions have become accustomed.
Whatever the internal all-is-well corporate BS might be, Netflix knows it’s at Threat Level Midnight. When people pull up Netflix on Christmas Day, they need to be able to hit the button that opens the app, and then to press the link that goes to the football games. Without lagging, buffering, pixilated video, or outages. These are significant games, not late-season throwaways. If the viewing experience is anything less than normal, that’s not gonna be good for anybody.
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