Netflix’s Jake Paul-Mike Tyson Brought In Some Serious Eyeballs When It Wasn’t Buffering

The Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight is in the books and while the focus of the entire evening was the fight itself, an interesting sub-plot had to do with the event being Netflix's first foray into live sports.

Sure, I'd count that Joey Chestnut vs. Takeru Kobayashi hotdog-eating contest on Labor Day as its first big sporting event, but I guess the Tyson-Paul fight was just a tad bigger, and the numbers reflect that.

The streaming giant announced that the fight had been viewed in 60 million households.

Whoa. 60 million (also, props for acknowledging the giant, buffering elephant in the room).

That's a big number, but it's Netflix's number that they're self-reporting. It's not super clear what they considered to be a "view."

OutKick founder Clay Travis pointed out that if the number is right, Netflix may have played host to the biggest non-Super Bowl sporting event of the year on Friday.

He also pointed out something that could become a bigger talking point in the years to come and that will be the need to have some uniform way to track streaming viewership, similar to the way Nielsen tracks broadcast and cable television.

True.

Still, I think we all expected a big number, I just want more clarity about what is a "view." I sat and watched the entire stream, but I also know people who threw it out of curiosity only to rage quit on it when the buffering got out of control and went back to watching Seinfeld.

You'd have to assume there's a minimum threshold that Netflix is using to determine a household view, but since these are their self-reported numbers, it probably doesn't have to be too big. Maybe just a couple minutes of a four-and-a-half-hour-plus broadcast.

This will all come up in about a month and a half when Netflix takes another stab at sports when it streams two Christmas Day NFL games.

They'd also better figure out how to do something about the constant buffering or some Marty Moose Egg Nog Mugs might be going through some TVs on Christmas Day.