Netflix’s Ted Sarandos on Jake Paul-Mike Tyson Glitches: “We Were Stressing the Limits of the Internet Itself”

Despite the technical glitches, Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos called the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight “off the charts.”

The fight, which streamed live on Netflix Nov. 15, was plagued by screen buffering and freezing issues for some users. Speaking during the UBS conference in New York Tuesday, Sarandos pointed to the tech challenge of streaming to an “enormous live audience” of 108 million globally people watching live for a five-and-a-half hour streaming event.

“We were pushing the [internet service provider], every ISP in the world, right to the limits of their own capacity. We were stressing the limits of the internet itself that night,” Sarandos said. “So 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.”