Netflix has been making quite a splash with its recent boxing event. On November 15th, Jake Paul faced off against Mike Tyson, and the numbers are truly astonishing. According to the streamer, a whopping 108 million people worldwide tuned in to watch this social media star-turned-boxer emerge victorious over the 58-year-old former heavyweight champion. These figures are based on U.S. viewing tallies from analytics company TVision and Netflix’s first-party data from the rest of the world. Just two days prior, Netflix had announced that 60 million of its member households worldwide (approximately one in every five subscription holders) had watched the bout, with a peak of 65 million concurrent streams.

Related Stories and Previous Fights

Before the Paul-Tyson bout, a title fight between women’s super lightweight champion Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano took place. Katie Taylor emerged as the winner in a controversial unanimous decision, and this fight brought in 74 million viewers worldwide, with 47 million watching in the United States. According to average minute audience (the closest streaming analogue to linear TV measurement) from TVision, this made the Taylor-Serrano fight the most watched professional women’s sporting event ever in the U.S.In Netflix’s standard metric of views (total viewing divided by run time), the full event of the Paul-Tyson fight racked up 46.6 million from Friday through Sunday. This easily became the biggest total to date for a Netflix live presentation over that length of time.

Glitches and Comparison to Other Sports Telecasts

Despite a glitchy live telecast that led to numerous complaints from viewers about buffering and audio problems during the bouts, all those viewers still came. The Paul-Tyson bout was the most streamed sporting event ever, but it still falls behind some other huge global sports telecasts. The NFL reported that February’s Super Bowl LVIII had a global audience of about 186 million people (123.7 million domestically), and soccer’s governing body FIFA claimed that more than 1 billion people saw the 2022 men’s World Cup final between Argentina and France. A 2017 heavyweight fight between Wladimir Klitschko and Anthony Joshua also claimed a nine-figure audience worldwide, with estimates as high as 500 million viewers.These numbers highlight the immense popularity and impact of boxing events on a global scale. Netflix’s foray into the boxing world has clearly captured the attention of millions of viewers around the world, and it remains to be seen what other exciting events they have in store for the future.