Sports broadcasters and tech teams lost no time at the weekend piling into Netflix’s struggle to keep the live Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul match in Texas on air around the world.

“Watching Netflix struggle to stream the boxing match today morning is a reminder of the tech that we take for granted now, in India, thanks to the #scale engineering that JioCinema Disney+ Hotstar have demonstrated over the years,” said JioStar/JioCinema tech head, Akash Saxena.

“Call us NFLX – #JioStar will take care of it,” he said on LinkedIn, adding a wide-smile emoji before writing: “on a serious note, it’s a humbling reminder that live streaming is a hard problem and it’s as much about in-event decision making as prep work prior. Constant journey to be able to serve even higher numbers of customers that switch to digital”.
The lively tech debate that followed included support for Netflix’s bet on live sports and its contribution to industry development.

“Netflix has developed many OSS tools and have made it available for free. Let’s not criticise them for one glitch,” said data platform engineer Srikanth.

“Come on, one glitchy boxing match doesn’t erase Netflix’s 15+ years of streaming experience. Sure, JioCinema and Hotstar handle cricket well, but let’s not get carried away,” said software engineer Neeraj Jain.

Streaming media analyst and consultant, Dan Rayburn, listed “buffering, stuttering, pixelation and error codes” from multiple users as #buffering trended on X. “Fail on Netflix’s part and this makes me worried for the NFL games on Netflix at Christmas,” Rayburn said.

Sympathy went out to the teams behind the live stream.

“It’s a disaster to be honest. They’re streaming like it’s 1998. They have priority routing too so this is epic. I feel bad for the teams who worked hard for this,” said product manager Ryan M in one of the many comments following Rayburn’s post.

Boxing fans were way less charitable, going berserk across media platforms about the buffering and unstable signal. Comments ranged from rude to suggestions to that someone “tell Elon to send starlink to Netflix. This shit is dumb”.