Netflix’s latest live gambit of pitting someone who a lot of people would like to see punched against a man extremely good at punching paid off in at least one way last night: You really couldn’t go anywhere on social media on Friday evening without seeing people talk about Jake Paul Vs. Mike Tyson. Admittedly, they were saying things like, “Netflix sure is having trouble buffering this live sports event,” or “The microphones keep breaking,” or just “This is a pretty boring boxing match,” but hey, at least they were talking about it.
By all accounts, the long-delayed match-up was a massive triumph for the forces of hype over all other challengers, with numerous celebrities in attendance, tons of buzz, and the largest non-Vegas boxing gate in U.S. History. It was not necessarily a massive triumph for Netflix proving it can handle live events on this order of magnitude—something it’s going to be tackling again pretty soon, with plans to broadcast live football games around Christmas—with numerous people complaining about buffering, freezes, and smeared images during the broadcast. Still, y’know, growing pains—for the world’s most successful video streamer, which has dominated the landscape it helped create, and which you’d think would have better infrastructure in place to handle this sort of thing before making it a big part of its upcoming brand. (Dear god, what if this had happened during Everybody’s In L.A.? We might have missed a bon mot by Richard Kind!)
As for the actual boxing contest, Paul apparently won, having hit Tyson more than Tyson hit him, without experiencing so much brain trauma that his body collapsed to the ground, unmoving. (As we understand it, this is the goal of boxing, along with giving Rosie Perez something to talk about on a Friday night.) Hopefully at some point someone will ask Tyson, now 58, about how he feels about the outcome of the match, if only because we think we still have a little will to live left after his last monologue on his life, and would like to get that taken care of as quickly as is convenient.
[via THR]
English (US) ·