While many viewers experienced stream buffering and the in-ring action proved less than stellar, last Friday’s boxing match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul drew record fight sports betting numbers, according to reports.
A representative with BetMGM told the New York Post this week that the matchup produced the highest betting numbers for any fight in history, including UFC fight cards. The eight-round “battle” that saw Paul triumph in a decision drew four times more money wagered than the next highest fight, according to BetMGM. Apparently much of that money was placed on Tyson.
“Paul winning was a good outcome for the sportsbook,” BetMGM senior trader Alex Rella told newspaper.
Betting Big And Buffering
The most popular wager was Tyson to win by knockout or disqualification at +250. That was followed by Tyson taking the win by decision at +1100 and Tyson winning in the first round was the third most popular bet at 14/1.
The Netflix fight drew 60 million households who checked out the action – or lack thereof. However, the event was marred by technical issues and complaints on social media from viewers around the world who experienced repeated buffering issues and outages, necessitating restarting the application numerous times.
That has led to some concerns that the platform may not quite be ready for primetime when it comes to airing major live sporting events. The platform will be home to a pair of exclusive NFL games on Christmas Day. But an NFL representative told Front Office Sports that the league has faith that Netflix will iron out any issues when the action kicks off on Dec. 25.
Netflix CTO Elizabeth Stone said in a company memo that the company will learn from the experience and fine-tune its technical strategy for future live events.
“This unprecedented scale created many technical challenges, which the launch team tackled brilliantly by prioritizing stability of the stream for the majority of viewers,” Stone noted. “I’m sure many of you have seen the chatter in the press and on social media about the quality issues.
“We don’t want to dismiss the poor experience of some members, and know we have room for improvement, but still consider this event a huge success.”