Can Netflix avoid another streaming fiasco on NFL Christmas games?

On Christmas Day, the streaming giant will air the first two games, first with the Kansas City Chiefs facing the Pittsburgh Steelers (1 p.m. ET) followed by the Houston Texans hosting the Baltimore Ravens (4:30 p.m. ET). 

The audience won’t be as large as it was for the fight, but with Dec. 25 being the busiest day for Netflix – along with performances from Mariah Carey, Beyonce and Pentatonix across the two games – the streaming issues that plagued many viewers’ experience when Paul defeated Tyson on Nov. 15 is something the NFL and Netflix have monitored in the weeks since. 

The only guarantee with a worldwide broadcast dependent on thousands of internet service providers (ISPs) is that somebody, somewhere, will experience technical difficulties. All ISPs do things a little bit differently, streaming industry expert Dan Rayburn said, and there’s no one right way to do it. 

“Every single time another person watches for an additional second, you need additional capacity,” Rayburn told USA TODAY Sports. 

NFL STATS CENTRAL: The latest NFL scores, schedules, odds, stats and more.

Compared to a traditional network broadcast, whether one person or 10 million people watch, CBS does not need to require additional infrastructure. Neither do radio or cable TV channels. That’s the magic of satellites. 

Netflix has 282.3 million subscribers in over 190 countries, with a fraction expected to tune into the games. That could still be a significant number that stresses Netflix’s powers.

“The whole reason they did the boxing event … was to test for (the) NFL,” said Rayburn, who noted that the company’s original plan of scheduling the fight in July would have allowed additional time to prepare. 

Peacock pulled in 23 million viewers during last season’s Dolphins-Chiefs wild-card playoff game to become the most-streamed sporting event in the U.S. at the time. The Tyson-Paul fight pulled in more than quadruple that.  

“We now know from experience what are the main pressure points in our infrastructure and are promptly addressing them ahead of the NFL games,” Netflix said in a series of written responses to USA TODAY Sports. “Some behaviors of our live streaming systems are impossible to replicate in a test and are only visible at huge scale with real viewers. We studied that in detail and are adjusting our content delivery, encoding, and streaming protocols accordingly.” 

And the company, with a market capitalization of nearly $390 billion, can invest in the sports space without fear of retribution. 

“How often has Netflix not worked for you or anybody else outside of the boxing event?” Rayburn said. “It’s almost always perfect.” 

The agreement with the NFL for Christmas broadcasts is for three years, but there is no guarantee the company will broadcast more than one game in 2025 and 2026. The games will be produced by CBS, with a prolific roster of talent set to call and analyze the games. But the extensive hiring has also occurred behind the scenes.

“Netflix has hired some extremely qualified, smart people from the streaming industry, from some of their content competitors,” Rayburn said. “YouTube TV and Netflix are taking everybody in the live event business that has experience.” 

Another factor in the variance of viewer experience is the many types of devices on which people can stream – and most times, issues can be resolved by making sure the device and Netflix app have the latest versions installed. 

“The moment Netflix is streaming, they don’t control the device,” Rayburn said. “They don’t own the hardware. Is it going on a Roku, Apple TV, Xbox, LG? So now they have to make it work on every single device out there, which all uses different protocols, different players. Some of them cache content for longer periods of time than others.” 

Netflix said it has continued ‘collaborative relationships with ISP partners to further grow our interconnection capacity.’ The company’s ISP capacity was “taxed” during the Tyson-Paul fight and, based on their findings from the event, “we’ve made additional optimizations of our systems to improve quality of experience for members.”

While this is Netflix’s first foray into broadcasting NFL games, there have been live sports on the platform (including a golf exhibition and a Carlos Alcaraz-Rafael Nadal match), along with other live streams such as “The Roast of Tom Brady.” Live sports are part of Netflix’s future content strategy, clearly, with the platform agreeing to broadcast the Women’s World Cup in 2027 and 2031.

‘We’re so excited in the NFL about Netflix becoming a huge part of our future,’ Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said during the broadcast of the Tyson-Paul fight, which was held at AT&T Stadium in Dallas.

The league has put on a brave face when discussing any concerns about potential wide-scale connectivity issues. 

“It’s a process, and they’re learning,” NFL chief media and business officer Brian Rolapp said at Sports Business Journal’s Innovators Conference last month. “I think all of these new tech companies who are getting into large-scale streaming are learning this.” 

Isolated issues come with the territory of being in the live sports business, former ESPN executive and media analyst John Kosner said. 

“If there’s more than that, there’s obviously going to be a lot of coverage of it,” Kosner told USA TODAY Sports. 

The NFL is likely weary of potential streaming issues, but as always, Kosner said, Commissioner Roger Goodell and Co. will take the long view. 

“They want to get Netflix hooked on the NFL. And I think the NFL thinks, as I do, that this is a solvable problem. Hopefully it’s a problem solved (Wednesday),” Kosner said. “Similarly, Netflix has a lot riding on Christmas Day. All of its top executives are going to be home watching. The NFL is such a big deal that if they experience more tech problems, it’s a black eye, so nobody wants that.”

Amazon, which has exclusively streamed “Thursday Night Football” for three seasons, didn’t have the smoothest debut when the Chiefs and Los Angeles Chargers played on Sept. 15, 2022. 

“Pre-COVID, the conventional wisdom was that the Internet was unlikely to ever be able to handle the necessary scale of an NFL game,” Kosner said. “Amazon obviously proved that wrong, and they’ve done a terrific job.”

YouTube TV, the “NFL Sunday Ticket Provider” since last season, had a substantial outage in October 2023 that drew the ire of fans.

‘We’re not worried. We’ve worked a ton with Netflix getting ready for this,” Rolapp said. “I think there’s a reason they did the fight when they did the fight. What they do is hard. Migrating large events to the Internet infrastructure has been a process.” 

The quality of experience dashboards (QOE) will be examined in real time Wednesday, Rayburn said, same as the company did during the Tyson-Paul fight. 

“Within 24 hours with the (fight) being over, Netflix already knew very quickly, very detailed what needed to be worked on, what the approach would be,” Rayburn said. ”This isn’t rocket science. This doesn’t take days to figure out the data.”

This story has been updated with new information.