Netflix is planning to provide plenty of gifts for viewers of its two NFL games on Christmas, including Mariah Carey kicking it all off with a taped performance of “All I Want for Christmas is You.”
And yet Netflix realizes it all amounts to a lump of coal if there are streaming problems.
Brandon Riegg, vice president of nonfiction series and sports, has had to answer plenty of questions about the streaming giant’s readiness for the influx of viewers on what could be its biggest day ever, especially after technical problems for some customers during the Nov. 14 fight between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson.
“The sheer tonnage of people that came to watch was incredible. And for all the testing that the engineering team had done ahead of that, and I think they’re the best in the business, the only way to test something of that magnitude is to have something of that magnitude,” Riegg said.
“We never want to have technical issues or a disappointing experience for our members. There was a subset of people that were watching that struggled with that, and we acknowledge that. The good news is they stress-tested the system to such a degree that there’s a lot of these fixes and improvements that they realized that they could make, and they’re applying all that stuff.”