Netflix claimed a peak viewership of 65 million for the Jake Paul v Mike Tyson fight; it is speculated that they might add 10 million subscribers in Q4 of this year. The depressing possibility is that this wild success will serve only to encourage them.
Not that everyone who tuned in got what they paid for. By Sunday lunchtime, more than 100,000 users had been on Downdetector, a website that logs and collates service outages, to lash out about the viewing experience with the sort of aggression that the contest itself had so sorely lacked.
Some of that enormous viewership experienced difficulties with the stream of the fight: jerky, slow, freezing. Netflix is transmitting games from the NFL this Christmas; imagine the uproar if a key touchdown or interception is missed due to buffering. On the upside, the Paul-Tyson fight was such poor entertainment that staring at a blank screen with a whirring percentage icon was arguably more enjoyable.
The phrase “a new low for boxing” has been used in so many instances now as to be denuded of meaning but, with apologies, it is hard to deny that this was indeed ANLFB. Paul, 27, made his name and fortune making silly videos on YouTube and if you want to feel a) old and b) in despair about the future of humanity, then knock yourself out with a watch of them.
The fight was a whammy for anyone of an older generation than Paul: absolute mystification as to how and why this lad has become so huge, plus the whole “remorseless march of time” angle of seeing Iron Mike reduced to the stakes of a bum. The argument has been advanced that this sort of hoopla could get a new generation of fans into the actual sport of boxing; surely it’s much more likely that it drags boxing down to its level.
The sparring videos Tyson’s camp had put out on social media were suggesting a far quicker and more mobile fighter than the one who laboured through eight rounds on Friday night, but given that the clips were only two or three seconds long each, he probably had time to recover between flurries. A week or two, say.
This discrepancy, coupled with the fact that he landed one decent left jab on Paul early on but failed to follow it up, led a significant number of people online to speculate that the proceedings were a fix. Come off it. There is no way you would script entertainment this bad. And no human could possibly resist the urge to give Paul a smack in the chops if presented with that perfectly punchable face.
So the only conclusion is the obvious one: a 58-year-old geezer was fighting a fit and strong hobbyist half his age and it was too much. It was only going to go one way. Paul might be a complete balloon of a bloke but you have to admit a grudging admiration to him and his team for pulling off the heist. At least Tyson got paid, and nobody got hurt.
The broadcast itself was a relatively new departure for Netflix and, even aside from the tech nuts and bolts of delivering live content via that platform, the inexperience showed. Sound dropped out, presenters were picked up by mics querying what was going on. A cameraman got too close to a cheerleader chorus line and got kicked. Funny.
They had Evander Holyfield on a pundit panel and he couldn’t hear what was being said (not because Tyson had bitten his ears off). Kate Abdo, normally a reliable presenter, had bizarrely adopted an American accent for portions of the night. Her commentary colleague, Mauro Ranallo, was certainly giving it the full gun, bellowing “This. Is. Life” as the fighters took to the ring. Ranallo is a WWE commentator by trade and the parallels between this ersatz sport-type-product and that one are obvious.
The defining image of the night, as it turned out, was Tyson being interviewed before the contest and then turning away from the interviewer to walk off, backside uncovered, hanging out of his jock. A 58-year-old bum indeed, but still a hell of a lot more likeable than Jake Paul.
