Netflix Exec Says Streaming Giant Is Ready For NFL Christmas Day Debut After Buffering Fiasco

A while back, it was announced that Netflix was going all in on live sports by acquiring the rights to stream both Christmas Day NFL games this year.

That's cool, but after the buffering fiasco, many either experienced or at least heard about during the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight last month, a lot of people are curious as to whether or not Netflix learned anything from its first major foray into live sports.

According to one executive, Netflix certainly has.

Netflix Vice President of Nonfiction Series and Sports Brandon Riegg told the Associated Press that the company learned a lot from the brutal buffering issues that caused a lot of people to say, "Screw this!" and flip back to watching Seinfeld like they normally do.

"The sheer tonnage of people that came to watch was incredible. And for all the testing that the engineering team had done ahead of that, and I think they’re the best in the business, the only way to test something of that magnitude is to have something of that magnitude," Riegg explained. 

"We never want to have technical issues or a disappointing experience for our members. There was a subset of people that were watching that struggled with that and we acknowledge that. The good news is they stress-tested the system to such a degree that there’s a lot of these fixes and improvements that they realized that they could make, and they’re applying all that stuff."

A Netflix exec is confident that the buffering issues that plagued the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson bout last month have been fixed. (Photo by Nikos Pekiaridis/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

I hope he's right. We all treated the Paul-Tyson fight like a bit of a goof, and it was kind of funny when it didn't exactly go swimmingly.

But if NFL games — especially good matchups like we're getting on Christmas Day — get interrupted, I fear that some kid's new electric scooter is going to be hurled through a brand-new TCL television by an angry father under the influence of egg nog.

What I don't understand is how Netflix is struggling with this. Other platforms have streamed games on this kind of scale. Peacock had done it. Amazon Prime does it every week (sure the games usually stink, but they still do it).

So, I'm kind of surprised the company that more or less kickstarted the streaming revolution is having so much trouble figuring this out, but maybe it'll be smooth sailing on Christmas… but I'm less optimistic than Netflix brass.