The NFL is backing Netflix as the home for its Christmas Day series of games, even after the streamer's broadcast of Friday night's Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight was interrupted by technical issues.
The issue has been in the headlines since the much-anticipated match; Front Office Sports reported The league is confident it will rise to the challenge when Netflix airs the Chiefs-Steelers and Ravens-Texans games next month.
The NFL was clearly monitoring the outcome of the Paul vs. Tyson fight at the Cowboys' home in Arlington, Texas, and how Netflix handled broadcasting the entire game.
Buffering issues and outages plagued viewers that night, prompting the NFL to begin new conversations with Netflix over its technical infrastructure.
“There was obviously a huge amount of emails and phone calls over the weekend,” a source told the publication. “What happened definitely got some attention and conversations.”
Netflix Chief Technology Officer Elizabeth Stone acknowledged the shortcomings of broadcasting in an internal memo, noting that its “unprecedented scale has presented many technical challenges.”
The FOS report said the NFL was somewhat relieved to learn that Netflix's first major foray into live sports programming was separate from the NFL.
This year marks the first year of the NFL's three-year deal with Netflix for its streaming service to broadcast games on Christmas Day.
The company plans to install two machines this year and broadcast one game each in 2025 and 2026.
Netflix is diving headfirst into live sports over the coming weeks, with Paul vs. Tyson taking the first big step, two NFL games on Christmas, and WWE's Monday It was taken over as the home of “Night Row''.
WWE announced last January that it had struck a $5 billion deal to make the streaming service the home of the Raw series for the next 10 years.
