The NFL is hoping to avoid some holiday Netflix and Chuck the TV out of the Window. After the streaming giant endured gigantic streaming issues airing Mike Tyson’s slap’n’tickle with some influencer, many football fans have good reason to worry about the NFL’s ability to carry out a clean broadcast. Netflix is scheduled to air two NFL games on Christmas Day, including the Steelers hosting the Chiefs. What else can league officials do but assure the public that they have supreme confidence in their broadcasting partner?
“I think [Netflix has] done an incredible job with all their preparations”, NFL executive vice president of media distribution Hans Schroeder told reporters yesterday, via Charean Williams of Pro Football Talk. “There were some bumps certainly with Netflix, but everything we’ve seen, we think their plan and the work we’re doing alongside them, we’re incredibly confident in and we feel incredibly well prepared for a great day on Christmas Day for our fans”.
And all NFL fans breathed a collective sigh of relief, of course. Because Schroeder’s principal argument seemed to focus more on the broadcasting end rather than the streaming. What fans are concerned about is not the production value but managing to watch the game at all. And ideally, to watch the game unpixellated without an endless buffering cycle.
Said Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos of the streaming issues during the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul fight, “We were pushing the [Internet service provider], every ISP in the world, right to the limits of their own capacity. We had a control room up in Silicon Valley that was re-engineering the entire Internet to keep it during this fight because of the unprecedented demand that was happening”.
That sounds like a bunch of nonsense to me, but it also doesn’t sound very reassuring. If Netflix had to re-engineer the entire Internet just to watch Mike Tyson hug it out, what is it going to have to do to get through two entire NFL games with premier franchises in the thick of the playoff and Super Bowl hunt?
Saying incredible and incredibly a lot might sound reassuring, but the proof will be in the pudding. Not that it ultimately matters. The NFL has a three-year deal with Netflix to stream Christmas Day games, which it shouldn’t be doing in the first place.
“We feel incredibly well prepared and incredibly excited about what that partnership is going to look like going forward”, Schroeder said.
The rest of us, not so much.
