Jake Paul lands a left to Mike Tyson during their heavyweight boxing match, Friday, Nov. 15, 2024, in Arlington, Texas. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez).
A Florida man delivered a punch against Netflix, filing a lawsuit this week against the media giant after buffering issues frustrated viewers who streamed the heavily publicized fight between ex-heavyweight champ Mike Tyson and social media star Jake Paul on Friday night.
Ronald “Blue” Dalton filed his complaint on Monday, three days after Paul, a YouTuber and actor who started boxing in 2018, won the fight by unanimous decision after eight rounds against Tyson, who retired from the ring in 2005.
“60 million Americans were hyped to see ‘Iron’ Mike Tyson, ‘The Baddest Man on the Planet’ versus You Tuber-turned-prizefighter Jake Paul,” the lawsuit said. “What they saw was ‘The Baddest Streaming on the Planet.””
“Netflix delivered the first punch of the night, to its customers, with unrelenting ‘buffering’ and blocked coverage,” the document added. “The most hyped fight in boxing history turned out to be a ‘record night,’ not for the fight(s) but for the money Netflix stole.”
Nakisa Bidarian, Paul’s copromoter and cofounder of Most Valuable Promotions, reacted to the streaming problems.
“I think, first and foremost, we broke the internet,” Bidarian said. “We did something that has never been done before. The record for streaming in the U.S. was 23 million concurrent, right? We blew past that. So Netflix has shown that it has an ability to do things that no other media platform has done before.”
Netflix admitted “many technical challenges” arose from the “stability of the stream” for the “majority of viewers” but claimed they were “tackled brilliantly,” the complaint said.
Of the over 100,000 people complaining online, Netflix appears to be the only one that described this fight night as “brilliant,” the document added.
The fight between the 58-year-old Tyson and the 27-year-old Paul had the biggest digital distribution for combat sports. It was distributed to more than 6,000 bars and restaurants across the country, the lawsuit said.
But tens of thousands of Netflix users watchers got no access, streaming glitches, and buffering issues.
“These caused Plaintiffs to ‘bite their gloves’ in frustration as they did not get what they bargained for as they missed large portions of the fight(s),” the complaint said, in reference to Tyson appearing to repeatedly bite his glove during the fight.
Some viewers reported Netflix crashed repeatedly throughout the fight.
Netflix reported the fight “knocked out the competition at #1 on the English TV List” and cleanly secured the most-watched title of the week with 46.6 million views for the entire event, reaching No. 1 in 78 countries and the Top 10 in all 91 countries tracked.
The fight was held at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, in front of 72,300 people. Netflix said the fight also dominated on X, accounting for 11 of the Top 11 trending topics in the U.S. and generating over 1.4 billion impressions across Netflix’s social channels.
Also trending were terms such as #NetflixBroken and #NetflixCrash.
Netflix declined to comment about the problems, local NBC affiliate WMAQ reported.
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