Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said demand for its live boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson on Nov. 15 was “off the charts,” despite some of its subscribers facing technical difficulties during the stream.
“We hate to disappoint a member for one second. So yes, there was some of that,” Sarandos admitted at UBS’ Media & Communications Conference on Tuesday. “But the real thing is, we had an enormous live audience: 108 million people watching live. You’d have to go back to the ’80s to get a live audience that big. It’s a Super Bowl-like audience that we were able to draw for this fight.”
He touted the match as the “largest streaming event in history” and “one of the largest live audiences in almost 40 years.”
“We were stressing the limits of the Internet itself that night,” Sarandos added. “We had a control room up in Silicon Valley that was re-engineering the entire Internet to keep it up during this fight because of the unprecedented demand that was happening.”
Sarandos also noted that the Katie Taylor vs. Amanda Serrano fight attracted 50 million people in the U.S. and 74 million around the world.
“A lot of records were set that night for a company that basically broke down during the ‘Love is Blind’ reunion about a year and a half before that,” he emphasized. “So that’s a lot of positive trajectory in a very short amount of time.”
The Tyson-Paul match was the latest live programming effort from Netflix as it looks to ramp up its advertising business.
“We severely undersold that fight,” Sarandos said. “If we knew the audience would be that big, we probably would have done a lot more selling on that fight.”
In addition to that fight night, Netflix is gearing up for two live NFL games on Christmas Day as well as WWE’s “Monday Night Raw” starting in January 2025, which have attracted “a lot” of advertising demand, according to Sarandos.
“We’re really excited with the opportunity to get people very excited about coming together and watching something and talking about it. And I think those moments are rare and very, very valuable. So that’s why we’re kind of leaning into [live events],” Sarandos said. “I don’t think a season of league sports — the economic challenges aside — every one of those nights is not necessarily an event, and really I want to focus on the live complexity and the live excitement on things that are truly events.”
While Netflix’s live events have been limited to the U.S. as it ramps up its capabilities, Sarandos said the goal is to eventually do “local to local streaming” more frequently. He reiterated that advertising will become a meaningful contributor to revenue post-2025.
“I do think that there’s no reason to believe we couldn’t be at the high end of the high of the premium CPMs with our programming,” Sarandos said.
When asked about his thoughts on the competitive landscape now that streaming has begun to mature, Sarandos replied: “I like where we sit for 2024, 2025 and the foreseeable future from there.”
“It’s going to be a competitive marketplace, because it’s a big business and we’ve never expected it not to be very competitive. But what’s interesting, we’ve got old media players who are trying to figure out their migration from linear still, and who are cutting their way to profitability in a way that is making their products — I don’t think more competitive, that’s for sure,” he continued. “And then we have the tech players who are juggling what the motivation is for what they’re doing and how good can they get at it. So Amazon and Apple have plenty of money and plenty of patience, so they’ll still be out there.”
As for industry consolidation, Sarandos said that he doesn’t see it changing the competitive landscape all that much.
“It’s the same programming, basically, that we’re competing with every day in different models or different revenue models for other folks,” he noted. “When companies tend to get together, they’re not doing that to charge more, they’re likely doing it to charge a little less, which I think continues the economic stress as long as they’re still navigating their legacy media businesses.”
