Advertisement
Hosting an NFL game between the 49ers and the Rams isn’t just a big deal for Melbourne. It’s a huge moment for Netflix, which is streaming the game everywhere but Australia.
Live sport was long deemed antithetical to the Netflix model and, along with news, appeared to be one of the last strongholds of traditional broadcast television. But the fortress is tumbling; the streaming barbarians aren’t just at the gate, they’ve taken it off its hinges, put their own coat of arms on it – and started charging the peasants for entry.
“Traditional broadcast is amazing at live events,” says Greg Peters, co-chief executive (alongside Ted Sarandos) of Netflix, who is visiting Australia this week for the game. “If you think about the technical architecture … it’s great at that; everyone’s watching the same thing at the same time. Obviously, we started from a totally different perspective, which is that anybody should watch whatever they want whenever they want. We built that first, and then it took us a while to get there.”
By “there” he means having the technical capacity to handle the data load that comes with everyone trying to watch the same thing at the same time via streaming. And Friday’s game represents perhaps the biggest test yet of just how “there” Netflix is.
Advertisement
The streamer entered the live sports space in 2023 with a manufactured golf tournament featuring Formula 1 drivers, then followed with an exhibition tennis match between Carlos Alcaraz and Rafael Nadal. But it was the boxing match between Mike Tyson, back in the ring after 20 years, and Jake Paul, 31 years his junior, in November 2024 that really signalled Netflix’s intent – and its limitations.
The event was watched by about 65 million people, way more than anticipated, and it caused servers to crash, feeds to drop out, and plenty of people to wonder if it wasn’t an example of massive hubristic overreach.
“We had an upper number of how many people we thought were going to watch,” Peters says of the planning for that fight. “We doubled that number from an infrastructure [streaming capacity] perspective, and we got double that number of viewers. And then things toppled over.”
The challenges aren’t limited to sports. Delays, glitches and/or crashes have been triggered by other high-demand events, including the reunion special of dating show Love Is Blind in 2023 and the first tranche of season 5 of Stranger Things last year. Yes, they are symptoms of success to a degree, but they are also not something a tech-led entertainment company wants to be known for.
Advertisement
According to its most recently published results, Netflix has more than 325 million paid subscribers worldwide. But, Peters points out, that number reflects only memberships, not the number of actual users; each membership could feasibly be used by multiple people on multiple devices at a single time.
So, hypothetically, if all those devices were to be turned to the NFL at the same time, could the infrastructure handle it?
“No, we would not be able to handle that,” Peters concedes.
Beyond the move to live sport, one of the other key areas for Netflix right now is AI. In April, the industry was stunned to learn the streamer had paid $US587 million ($812 million) to buy an AI start-up most people didn’t even know existed, Ben Affleck’s InterPositive.
Advertisement
Would it be fair to say that part of what you were buying was the imprimatur of Affleck, who has been a careful advocate of the use of AI as a tool while also defending the primacy of human creativity?
“I think your thesis is generally sound there,” Peters says. “There’s the technology, and then there’s how do you get the technology adopted and used. And good advocacy from people that are trusted, who also have a vision that’s consistent with how we think about it, is of some value.”
Netflix sees the AI model it has acquired as “an opportunity to give creators a bigger tool set. A lot of what this thing can do, you can do with traditional VFX tools. You can remove those wires, you can change things, but it’s quite expensive.”
AI will allow things to be corrected for a fraction of the cost – everything from the camera lens or lighting set-up used for a shot to the way an actor delivers their lines or responds in a scene.
Advertisement
“With the actor’s consent,” Peters hastens to add, “because we’re very clear on what our guidelines are, and we try to be industry-leading on those guidelines. But if the actor [was told], ‘You can come in and do a reshoot of that scene, or we’ve got something that’s very, very close; here’s a modification [done with AI], are you fine with that?’ Then the output you get from it is spot-on.”
AI has a role to play in the viewer experience, too. Peters sees it pushing the personalised recommendations at the heart of the Netflix algorithm to the next level.
“You can imagine having a conversation with your Netflix application, saying, ‘I’m a little bit frazzled after work. I would like an uplifting experience’, or ‘I’m feeling a little bit nostalgic; something from the ’80s’, and then here are a bunch of recommendations. We’re excited about that space.”
What about the personalisation not just of content choices, but of the content itself – the idea that the viewer might find themselves as a character in a uniquely tailored storyline (or, as in the dystopian version depicted in the Joan Is Awful episode of Black Mirror, as the horrified and unwitting subject of a show based on their own life)? Is that something you can envisage?
Advertisement
“I’m clearly a believer in personalisation in a lot of ways,” Peters says, “but I’m pretty confident that all of us having our own hyper-personalised individual entertainment experience is not a good place.
“What’s magic about a football match is that we are all experiencing the same thing at the same time. There’s tremendous value in that. I think this nichey, hyper-personalised thing, that’s a dead end. I don’t think people will find that particularly valuable at the end of the day.”
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.
You have reached your maximum number of saved items.
Remove items from your saved list to add more.
More:
Karl Quinn is a senior culture writer at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X, Facebook or email.AdvertisementAdvertisement