NOVEMBER 21, 2024

How big was last week’s Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight on Netflix? So big that even I, someone who almost never watches sports on TV and can barely tell the Paul brothers apart, spent part of my Friday night streaming that ridiculousness. The monoculture has largely disappeared in America, but for a few hours on Netflix, it almost felt like it was back. This week’s Buffering takes a look at what the strong numbers for the event mean, and why I’m still not sure the money spent on the whole thing was worth it. I’ve also got some thoughts on Comcast’s decision to spin-off most of its cable holding. As always thanks for reading, and just a reminder: we’re off next Thursday because of Thanksgiving. Here’s wishing you and yours a joyful holiday— as well as this very important poultry-related PSA

—Joe Adalian, West Coast editor, Vulture

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Sarah Stier/Getty Images

Last Friday as I was dropping my car off for some brake work, I overheard some of the mechanics talking about whether anyone planned to watch the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul fight on Netflix that evening. “Yeah, might as well,” someone said. “It doesn’t cost anything.”

Obviously Netflix isn’t free (especially after its crackdown on password sharing), but it was clear what this guy was saying: Unlike so many big bouts in recent years, boxing fans who wanted to watch Paul and Tyson dance around aimlessly for a half-hour didn’t need to shell out upwards of $100 to a pay-per-view distributor. So in the roughly two-thirds of U.S. homes which have a Netflix subscription, Paul vs. Tyson was essentially free for anyone who wanted to watch — and not surprisingly, a whole lot of folks did exactly that. But does that make it a big win for Netflix?

As you’ve likely read by now, Netflix says that at its peak, last Friday’s main event was streaming on 65 million devices around the world, with about 58 percent of the audience — 38 million accounts — located in the United States. That translated to around 108 million global viewers during an average minute of the fight, according to the streamer, which cited a Nielsen wannabe called TVision as its source. Oddly, Netflix hasn’t offered an estimate of how many viewers the Paul-Tyson fight drew just in the United States, but given it did say that about 58% of the total streams for the event originated here, it’s probably not a stretch to guess that roughly 58% of the 108 million worldwide viewers were located in the States, too. That would put the U.S audience just shy of 63 million viewers, making it one of 2024’s most-watched TV events. (The one caveat in all these superlatives is that, even though Netflix is a client of Nielsen, and will use the ratings giant to release data for its upcoming live NFL broadcasts, the streamer opted not to use Nielsen data for the fight, making comparisons to other big events more difficult.)

It seems pretty clear that audience interest in the event was absolutely huge. You didn’t even have to wait for a release from Netflix to know that a whole bunch of people tuned in: On the night of the fight, social media exploded with complaints from subscribers fuming about not being able to access the event, or with buffering issues once they got in. It was the Love Is Blind live reunion fiasco, but on steroids: a big tech “L” for a streamer which in the past would brag about how quickly its app starts up and how rarely users suffer from buffering issues.

I’m not at all suggesting that this is in any way a good thing for Netflix; it’s just the opposite, as I’ll get into a bit later. But since Netflix is used to managing tens of millions of concurrent streams every single day, the fact that it couldn’t quite do so last Friday sure seems to back up the streamer’s claim that some 65 million homes were streaming a single event all at once, including 38 million U.S. households.

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While you’d think that at this point Netflix had nothing left to prove — the streamer already completely revolutionized the global TV landscape — I do think the audience for last week’s event will go down as yet another watershed moment for the company. What Netflix demonstrated Friday was an ability to do something the Big Three broadcast networks used to do weekly for decades: Turn something into an event just by virtue of it airing on their platform. Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, tens of millions of Americans would watch programs that were absolute crap just because they had the right time slot on a network.

And when networks served up special events, we also showed up in bigger numbers than we might have otherwise, including when it came to boxing. One Friday night in late November 1979, for instance, about 55 million Americans turned on ABC to watch Sugar Ray Leonard take on Wilfred Benetiz. Earlier in the decade, more iconic bouts featuring Muhammad Ali generated even bigger audiences, capturing over half the available viewing audience at the time.

Back then, those sorts of numbers were big — but also not unusual. Not so today, when even the biggest shows on network TV rarely crack the 10 million viewer mark in terms of live viewing, while hit streaming shows usually need a few days (or even weeks) to amass a sizable crowd. But the fight between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson was able to get tens of millions of Americans to all park themselves in front of their TV sets (or laptops) at the same time. No doubt the lure of seeing a 58-year-old icon such as Tyson step in the ring with a cocky upstart like Paul is the sort of sports event that would draw a crowd wherever it aired. But had this event been a pay-per-view event or even an over-the-air broadcast network, the audience would’ve been notably smaller. This fight drew the audience it did — both here and globally — because of its location. In the same way being on NBC’s Thursday night in the 1990s elevated almost any show which aired on the night, the Paul-Tyson fight’s culture cachet was increased because it was on Netflix.

What was definitely a watershed for the streamer can also be seen as a warning. Yes, Netflix got people to show up, and the fact that it was able to do so no doubt will be useful to the company’s efforts to convince advertisers to sell their wares on the service. Unfortunately, Netflix’s image also took a major hit because of how crappy the viewing experience was for so many customers. The streamer has already lost its luster, especially among younger viewers, over its crackdown on password sharing (a practice it once encouraged); its habit of rarely letting shows, even successful ones, run for more than a few dozen episodes; and for introducing commercials into what was once a proudly ad-free environment.

What Netflix always had over its competition, however, was that it just worked: quickly loading, rarely buffering (at least relative to its rivals), and just overall offering a superior viewing experience. That wasn’t the case last week. And even beyond the tech issues, the actual event itself turned out to be less than thrilling: Not only was the big fight meh, but it was preceded by hours of hype and promotional blather about other Netflix events that got slammed on social media. The streamer could have labeled all of that as a pre-show, letting viewers know exactly when the main fight would start (and then actually having the fight start on time). But perhaps because it wanted to amass as many viewing minutes as possible, it directed audiences to show up at 8 p.m. ET for a bout that didn’t get underway until around midnight.

Obviously no customer paid more for the ability to watch the fight, and I truly doubt anyone who’s been subscribing to Netflix for its shows and movies is going to suddenly cancel because they had buffering issues for a few hours. Netflix is not some janky upstart that needed to prove itself; it’s not going to be Fyre Festival’d out of business, even if Netflix execs have to be annoyed that they didn’t solve all their live viewing gremlins after the aforementioned Love Is Blind finale fail. But co-CEO Ted Sarandos has often talked about how he and his fellow Netflix suits need to act as custodians of their members’ subscription fees — taking the $10, $15 or $20 per month folks pay for the streamer and then investing it in content that makes the service consistently better. If you just use audience size as the metric for success, then I suppose Sarandos will look at last week’s fight as a very smart bet that paid off. And maybe it was, particularly if he was hoping to use it as a calling card to attract future advertisers or demonstrate Netflix’s overall power.

Yet Netflix spent tens of millions for something that didn’t carry any traditional advertising and which will likely generate very little long-term viewing: People won’t be tuning in to this fight in big numbers for months and years to come the way they do with, say, old episodes of Outer Banks. The same thing is true with next month’s NFL games on Christmas Day (though, at least in this case, the streamer will be selling advertising, recouping some of the money it spent to land its pigskin package.) And if Netflix once again has trouble handling incoming traffic for those games, the outcry from fans will be five times as loud as last week. You do not mess with Americans and their football.

What’s more, every dollar spent on stunts like Paul-Tyson or even an NFL game is money that is not invested in shows or movies — the very bread and butter of Netflix. I absolutely think live events have a place on the platform, but they should either be relatively cost-effective (a reality show or talk/variety show, like the one John Mulaney did last May) or offer the prospect of long-tail viewing (a major concert or a stand-up special) or have the ability to keeps audiences coming back every week (the upcoming WWE deal). I’m not so sure one-offs like the fight or the NFL Christmas games really do that, even if they make a powerful statement about Netflix’s place in the media food chain.

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Ali Goldstein/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

The Kabletown era of NBC is coming to a close — or, at the very least, entering a much different phase. Back in December 2009, in a development foretold by the seers at 30 Rock, Philadelphia-based telecom giant Comcast announced the deal that would eventually lead to it taking full control of the storied Peacock network and its array of cable channels. On Tuesday, almost exactly 15 years later, Comcast said it was breaking up the empire it helped build, spinning off most of its cable TV holdings into a new stand-alone entity called (at least for now) “SpinCo.” Somewhere, Jack Donaghy wept.

While this week’s developments definitely have an end-of-an-era feel to them, I’m not sure a lot is going to change day-to-day at NBC or its streaming service Peacock, and I don’t think audiences will see that much of a difference — yet. Fact is, decoupling entertainment brands like USA Network, Syfy, E!, and Oxygen from the NBC broadcast network and the Peacock streaming service is just confirming what we’ve known for a few years now: There’s not a lot of value left in the biggest cable brands. Sure, 50 million-plus homes still pay for cable, but most are doing so for convenience (access to a physical DVR, a clear signal), the ability to get sports and news content, or the few really great cable brands still out there (think Hallmark Channel or TCM or one of the NBCU holdings that isn’t leaving the Peacock’s nest, Bravo). So while the new, smaller NBCU will soon be contributing a lot less to the cable bundle, I think what will remain — an NBC network lineup packed with the NFL and NBA; a still-vibrant Bravo; and, in theory, giving cable customers access to Peacock – means NBCU will still be able to generate a decent chunk of change from cable carriage fees, even if it won’t be as much as it brings in now. Meanwhile, the company will save a ton of money by not having to pay the costs associated with running so many channels — including the spun-off CNBC and MSNBC, which make money but are not inexpensive.

The decline in value of these once mighty cable assets can partially be chalked up to the impact from the shift to streaming. But a lot of what has happened is the end result of companies like NBCUniversal deciding to hasten cable’s decline by starving their networks of resources over the past five years, funneling the money that used to go to making original programming and clever marketing over to their respective streamers. Instead of giving consumers a reason to keep watching USA Network by letting those networks produce more engaging shows like Suits or the first season of Mr. Robot, NBCU (and other conglomerates) took that money and spent it making endless amounts of Content for Peacock and Paramount+ and, to a lesser degree, Hulu.

It’s true that ratings were falling when these companies were still making new shows. But by basically giving up on originals, and getting rid of the execs who used to work on marketing and scheduling these channels, NBCU and others put their cable holdings into hospice care years before they needed to make that transition. These channels aren’t worth holding on to because executives opted to chase after the hot new thing (streaming) rather than doing the work needed to figure out how to keep their longstanding relationships alive. Sure, even with better management, and even with more resources, there’s no universe in which those offloaded cable networks would be thriving right now. I just think the pivot to streaming could’ve been handled in a way that kept the cable ecosystem more vibrant for at least another decade.

As for what happens next, the best thing the new temporarily-titled “SpinCo” has going for it are its non-entertainment assets — MSNBC and CNBC. While MSNBC’s ratings post-election have taken a dive, there’s a good chance the numbers will rebound once The Trump Show has its second season premiere in January and progressive viewers emerge from mourning. Likewise, given the chaos Trump’s White House could unleash on the economy, CNBC will continue to be must-see for a niche audience of very wealthy folks. NBC News will of course remain under the control of NBC (thus not be spun off), but as of now there are short-term provisions which will let it provide resources to both CNBC and MSNBC. Long term, however, nothing is certain.

Whatever they end up being called, CNBC and MSNBC, plus existing carriage deals in place for the entertainment assets, should provide a solid starting point for SpinCo to recreate itself to reflect the new realities of the business. And that means getting bigger: Comcast execs have been blunt in saying they expect SpinCo will need to partner up with other companies in order to thrive, either by purchasing even more distressed cable networks or doing a joint venture with another company. It’s not hard to see possible matches.

For instance, it wasn’t that long ago that I and others were hearing industry buzz about Warner Bros. Discovery and Comcast forming some sort of joint venture. Nothing happened, and if something ever did, it might actually involve WBD teaming up with NBCU and Peacock. But I could also see WBD boss David Zaslav being open to getting rid of some of his lesser cable channels: Why not let TNT and TBS be part of the same team as USA Network and Syfy? Or maybe WBD would be open to figuring out a way to have CNN provide news content to MSNBC if, at some point, NBC News decides to fully divorce itself from MSNBC. Heck, there’s part of me that thinks that CNN and MSNBC could end up just merging and forming a more powerful rival to Fox News, though I’ve heard exactly zero talk that anybody at any company is even thinking about it.

Ditto a scenario where the company now known as Paramount Global — in the middle of its own reinvention under new owners Skydance Media — decides to strike a deal with SpinCo offering it the services of its CBS News anchors and reporters for MSNBC and CNBC. After all, if CNN’s Anderson Cooper can appear on 60 Minutes, why can’t someone from the Eye’s D.C. bureau do a live shot from the White House on MSNBC?

Again, this is just me spitballing. When it comes to what happens next with this new cable-centric company, I don’t pretend to know the answers– and apparently Mark Lazarus, the exec in charge of SpinCo, doesn’t either. He told MSNBC staffers Wednesday he’s not sure where the channel will get its news content from going forward, or even whether MSNBC and sister net CNBC will get to keep their current NBC-ish names and logos. These are pretty big details, and it’s telling that they’ve yet to be worked out. The bottom line with SpinCo right now is: Expect the unexpected.

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