When you step back and look at the situation, it's not hard to see why Netflix dropped the ball here. Here's now I see it (not affiliated with Netflix, pure speculation):
- Months ago, the "higher ups" at Netflix struck a deal to stream the fight on Netflix. The exec that signed the deal was probably over the moon because it would get Netflix into a brand new space and bring in large audience numbers. Along the way the individuals were probably told that Netflix doesn't do livestreaming but they ignored it and assumed their talented Engineers could pull it off.
- Once the deal was signed then it became the Engineer's problem. They now had to figure out how to shift their infrastructure to a whole new set of assumptions around live events that you don't really have to think about when streaming static content.
- Engineering probably did their absolute best to pull this off but they had two main disadvantages, first off they don't have any of the institutional knowledge about live streaming and they don't really know how to predict demand for something like this. In the end they probably beefed up livestreaming as much as they could but still didn't go far enough because again, no one there really knows how something like this will pan out.
- Evening started off fine but crap hit the fan later in the show as more people tuned in for the main card. Engineering probably did their best to mitigate this but again, since they don't have the institutional knowledge of live events, they were shooting in the dark hoping their fixes would stick.
Yes Netflix as a whole screwed this one up but I'm tempted to give them more grace than usual here. First off the deal that they struck was probably one they couldn't ignore and as for Engineering, I think those guys did the freaking best they could given their situation and lack of institutional knowledge. This is just a classic case of biting off more than one can chew, even if you're an SV heavyweight.
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