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Mike Tyson and Jake Paul’s boxing match has drawn heavy criticism. But could it be a sign of things to come?
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Jake Paul’s fight with Mike Tyson is unprecedented in so many ways. It is one of the most absurd matchups in boxing history – influencer Paul was born in January 1997, the year Tyson was disqualified for biting Evander Holyfield’s ear and his slow fall from form became a rapid slide. But it’s also Netflix’s first live-streamed, professionally sanctioned boxing match.
This is significant in ways the fight itself can never be. After all, Tyson came out of retirement after Jake Paul had a vision of himself trading blows with the former champ while on hallucinogens in Costa Rica. He was making a documentary for Netflix at the time and one thing led to another. Tyson is 58, Paul is 27 and the money is on a Jake Paul victory, an almost entirely meaningless win in real boxing terms.
But for Netflix, it’s the start of something serious. It will live stream two NFL games on Christmas Day – paying a reported $75m per game – and investors and analysts are watching the Tyson/Paul numbers to see if the event will “boost engagement & attract Ad Tier subs, viewers, & dollars,” according to a note by J P Morgan analysts ahead of the streamer’s third-quarter earnings results.
In November 2022, Netflix launched its cheaper ad-supported service to draw in viewers alienated by its soaring subscription prices. Two days ago it announced 70 million monthly active users, up from 40 million in May. Advertisers pay for numbers and they like those numbers to accumulate fast – while Netflix has historically been happy with a long-tail of viewing for a show drip feeding viewers over months. Advertising deals, though, are about short-term figures, not numbers accumulated over months or years.
Boxing is easy to film and takes place in a small space, so it’s had a long history with the small screen. Indeed, the sport has been something of a kingmaker for new arrivals. Legendary commentator Howard Cosell once said, “television and boxing were made for each other”.
The UK’s first televised boxing match was Archie Sexton vs Laurie Raiteri in 1933 just three years after the first TV programmes were broadcast. In the US, live boxing was first carried by NBC in the 1940s and became a staple of Friday nights. HBO made its name through live boxing – its first live fight was George Foreman defeating Joe Frazier in 1973, less than a year after the channel launched. So in a sense, it’s surprising it has taken Netflix this long to get into boxing.
It’s also late to the game in a literal as well as metaphorical sense when it comes to other sports. Amazon Prime Video has the NFL’s Thursday Night Football, and has 20 Premier League matches per season. Meanwhile,Apple TV+ has Major League Baseball on Friday nights and the US Major League Soccer games. In July Amazon signed an 11-year deal with the NBA, a move that has led to legal action from ESPN and NBC, the sport’s previous hosts.
To date, Netflix has dabbled in exhibition sports – The Netflix Cup saw Formula 1 drivers in a non-competitive round of golf with players from the PGA Tour and The Netflix Slam was an exhibition tennis match between Rafael Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz. It’s also paid for the global rights to WWE from next year which I suppose is sports in a kind of sense.
Part of the problem for a global streamer like Netflix is that most sports rights deals are signed on a country-by-country basis. Amazon’s 20 Premier League games are shown in the UK, for instance, and while Netflix does have local opt outs, so that any shows it co-produces with the BBC have a different UK roll out than the rest of the world, it thinks globally. As a result, the Premier League turned down an offer from Netflix in 2023 for a series following all 20 Premier League clubs across a single season.
The company has also bid, unsuccessfully, for exclusive rights to the ATP and WTA tennis tours across Europe’s big five markets, leading co-CEO Ted Sarandos to tell analysts in July that the company would prefer to cherry pick games rather than bid for “a lot of tonnage from any one league”.
“From a monetisation angle, the costs of this content is so high that it wouldn’t be possible for Netflix to just include it in the main offering,” explains Tom Harrington, analyst at Enders Analysis. “That means it would need to create special sports add-on packages which subscribers would have to pay for. This would be a major shift for a business like Netflix.”
So Netflix wants to push the live programming, and sports is an obvious way to do that but the big sporting leagues are unlikely to be part of the streamers’ live offering for quite some time, if at all. Football is potentially going through a vulnerable moment in the UK, thanks to Gary Lineker’s departure from Match of the Day. His stunts – like presenting the show in underwear after betting Leicester wouldn’t win the Premiership – kept MoTD in the headlines.
The BBC has had Premier League highlights for some time and the League will always carve out some free-to-air rights. But the Corporation’s access may reduce if Lineker’s replacement isn’t up to scratch and viewers drift to the same degree as Top Gear following Jeremy Clarkson’s departure.
The obvious answer is boxing. HBO dropped live boxing in 2018, ending a 45-year relationship with the sport. No-one has picked those rights up. So while Tyson v Paul is a circus, it might be the future. It depends on whether people will choose to watch it live. Well, will you, punk?
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