Well, this was about the most obvious dethroning in history. As you may expect, the second half of this season of Outer Banks was unable to hang onto its #1 spot, losing it to the 309 minute broadcast of the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight that aired last night.
Despite some good undercard fights, the Paul vs. Tyson fight itself, which did not start until around midnight ET, was universally panned as terrible, and the entire event was marred by severe buffering issues with the livestream, as Netflix is very new to live events like this, and this was a huge test. It failed.
This was always going to be the #1 spot by today, and it’s no surprise that the lead-in show, Countdown: Paul vs. Tyson, is now at #2. Honestly, that’s probably more worth watching than the fight itself, a boring affair where Tyson, way too old for this, barely threw any punches at all in some rounds, and Jake won on points in the end. Both participants walked away with tens of millions of dollars regardless, so the joke’s on us, really.
Further down the list, a new batch of final season Cobra Kai episodes have dropped, which are at #3 ahead of Outer Banks which is now suddenly all the way down to #4. Arcane is at #5, but that just released three new episodes today, so that should move up tomorrow. Maybe not, though, as it was only #1 for a day last time, and the competition here is somewhat intense at the moment. That Paul fight should probably last the weekend at least in that slot, no matter how bad it might have been. At least you can skip to it now, given that the live broadcast is over. Or you can just watch the better fights before it, and skip it entirely. That’s probably what I would do.
We’ll see what this means for Netflix’s future as an event streaming platform. This is certainly not the first time we’ve see a “stunt fight” like this, but the real issue was how many technical problems this event had, which is a big no-no for something like say, boxing, where any second something huge could happen to end a match. But I think this did some pretty significant damage to the idea that Netflix could become a leader in this space, both given how underwhelming this fight ended up being and how irritating it was to try and watch.
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