The business of Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul: Will this be one-and-done for Netflix?
IRVING, Texas — The biggest boxing spectacle of 2024 won’t cost consumers anything more than a one-month subscription to Netflix, approximately 25% or less than the sport’s typical pay-per-view events.
Jake Paul and Nakisa Bidarian, Paul’s business partner and co-founder of MVP Promotions, picked the world’s largest streaming service over boxing’s maligned mode of offering its highest-profile bouts because they want Paul’s unusual encounter with Mike Tyson to reach the broadest audience possible. Paul-Tyson will also become Netflix’s first official live sporting event, excluding golf and tennis exhibitions, because it’ll occur five weeks before Netflix streams two NFL games on Christmas Day.
Netflix boasts almost 283 million paid subscribers in more than 190 countries, and through unpoliced password sharing, is available in a projected 600 million homes worldwide.
If Bidarian’s forecast comes true, Paul-Tyson, scheduled for Friday night at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, will surpass the NFL wild-card game 10 months ago between Kansas City and Miami as the most-streamed sporting event in U.S. history. NBC paid a reported $110 million for the exclusive rights to stream Chiefs-Dolphins, which attracted an audience of 23 million to Peacock on Jan. 13.
Surpassing such huge viewership would also make Paul-Tyson the most viewed boxing match since the advent of cable television, which became boxing’s best friend from a financial standpoint and its worst enemy in terms of marginalizing what was once one of the most prominent sports in the U.S. when boxing aired regularly on network television.
Nielsen Media Research estimated that Muhammad Ali’s victory over Leon Spinks in their heavyweight championship rematch in September 1978 was watched on ABC by 90 million people — an estimated 47% of U.S. televisions in use at the time. If 900,000 viewers watch even the most meaningful boxing matches nowadays, it is considered a commercial success.
“I didn’t want fans to think about paying $60, $70, $80 to buy what is a unique product,” Bidarian told Uncrowned. “When I say unique, to the point everyone makes, it’s a 58-year-old and a 27-year-old. And no matter how you get around experience and the abilities, that’s still a minefield of questions. ‘Is this real? Do I want to pay for this?’ I didn’t want someone to buy and then, after the fact, be like, ‘That wasn’t a great experience. Eff you, MVP! Eff you, Jake Paul!’ Alright? And, you know, ‘Mike just did this for the money.’”
Though 31 years younger than Tyson, the polarizing Paul (10-1, 7 KOs) is a comparatively inexperienced cruiserweight with a stronger social media presence than résumé. Tyson (50-6, 44 KOs) is a reinvented heavyweight legend, yet 19 years removed from quitting on his stool in what was supposed to be his final official fight against Irish underdog Kevin McBride in June 2005.
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To account for this peculiar pairing, Paul’s company made the highly anticipated women’s rematch between undisputed junior welterweight champion Katie Taylor (23-1, 6 KOs) and seven-division champ Amanda Serrano (47-2-1, 31 KOs) the 10-round co-feature. Paul and Bidarian also struck a deal with Al Haymon’s Premier Boxing Champions to place WBC welterweight champ Mario Barrios (29-2, 18 KOs) on the undercard against Abel Ramos (28-6-2, 22 KOs), another boxer PBC represents.
Taylor-Serrano II and Barrios-Ramos both figure to be action-packed contests that’ll entertain fans before Paul and Tyson enter the ring to box bound by modified rules.
They’ll wear 14-ounce gloves, with more padding than the traditional 10-ounce gloves used for heavyweight bouts. They are scheduled for eight two-minute rounds as well, shorter than typical three-minute rounds for male matches.
Bidarian nevertheless believes the event will be well received because of the public’s curiosity about Paul-Tyson, combined with compelling, competitive championship bouts.
“This is an opportunity to refresh how amazing boxing is to as wide of an audience as possible,” Bidarian said. “And, for us, that has value through many different angles. The biggest obviously being that boxing gets reinvigorated in popular culture, in one night, in a way that is hard to do in a world where there is constant content, constant push of information through algorithms, just filtering based on what you usually consume.”
MVP Promotions also strategically serviced Netflix by making a six-round middleweight match in which India’s Neeraj Goyat (18-4-2, 8 KOs) will battle Brazilian comedian Whindersson Nunes (pro debut) in the opener of Netflix’s four-fight offering (8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT). Only the United States (almost 67 million) has more Netflix subscribers than Brazil (more than 15 million), whereas India ranks in the top 10 on Netflix’s list of subscribers (more than 6 million).
The three-fight preliminary portion of the Paul-Tyson undercard will be streamed on the Netflix Sports’ and MVP Promotions’ YouTube channels, starting at 5:30 p.m. ET/2:30 p.m. PT.
Undefeated featherweight contender Bruce “Shu Shu” Carrington (13-0, 8 KOs) headlines the early portion of the event in an eight-rounder against Australia’s Dana Coolwell (13-2, 8 KOs).
The 27-year-old Carrington, who is promoted by Bob Arum’s Top Rank Inc., grew up idolizing Tyson, who was raised three decades earlier in the same Brownsville section of Brooklyn as Carrington. Carrington pushed Top Rank to allow him to be part of the Paul-Tyson show, which Arum’s brain trust happily allowed.
Todd duBoef, Top Rank’s president, isn’t convinced, however, that merely competing on the early portion of the undercard will be as beneficial for Carrington’s profile as some might expect.
“Do I think his career is gonna explode as a result of it?” duBoef asked Uncrowned. “It’s pretty hard to say, ‘Yes, that’s going to happen,’ because the attention isn’t really going to him. He’s fighting early in the night and the promotion is based on the names of Tyson and Jake Paul.”
He hopes he is wrong, but duBoef doesn’t think Paul-Tyson will necessarily lead to Netflix executives developing an appetite for streaming boxing with regularity. Partnering with Netflix is something boxing desperately needs as this niche sport attempts to at least maintain — and ideally expand — its ever-shrinking fan base in this challenging age of streaming.
Premium cable channels HBO and Showtime, the two most supportive platforms of boxing for parts of six decades, respectively stopped broadcasting boxing at the start of 2019 and the beginning of 2024. Fox exited the boxing business before Showtime and ESPN is not expected to renew its seven-year deal with Top Rank when it expires at the end of next August.
PBC has a new streaming partner in Prime Video, but Amazon’s streaming service has offered only four pre-pay-per-view undercards and one non-pay-per-view show since the partnership was announced in early 2024. Top Rank will need a new streaming partner as well if it can no longer offer its fights through ESPN+.
“I’m not sure [Netflix] did this for boxing,” duBoef said. “I think they did this for the event. I don’t know what they’re looking at in boxing. What I do know is they’re looking at events. And this is a fantastic event to create an enormous amount of global interest. That’s how I would look at it.”
A Netflix spokeswoman informed Uncrowned on Tuesday that executives for the streaming service will not be made available to discuss the company’s potential interest in boxing beyond Friday night.
Stephen Espinoza, the former president of Showtime Sports, agrees with duBoef’s assessment of Netflix’s first venture into boxing. Espinoza produced three of Paul’s pay-per-view fights when he handled Showtime’s boxing programming and served as Tyson’s entertainment attorney for 12 years before Showtime hired him in 2011.
“Looking from the outside, the Netflix strategy seems to be to create their own one-off sporting events — made-fors, if you will — featuring some of the biggest names in each particular sport,” Espinoza told Uncrowned. “These have been isolated sporting events. Where is their objective? Where is their interest in diving into any sport of any kind?
“As opposed to creating these one-off special events that they sort of own. In terms of boxing, sure, if this is a massive event and satisfies all of the [key performance indicators] that they hoped for, then one would think that they would be open to more events of this type, and maybe more boxing. But I think the leap from, you know, one-off boxing events to a regular schedule is a rather large one.”
Even if it is a one-time thing, Barrios, who fought many times on Showtime and Fox, believes this is a once-in-a-career chance.
“I’m excited for the opportunity,” Barrios told Uncrowned on Tuesday night. “Boxing is kind of in this weird transition right now, where it’s hitting all these streaming platforms. And to be defending my title on the first card on Netflix, I’m very proud to have gotten the opportunity. That’s an important part of it, having that bigger reach than just boxing. There’s going to be people all around the world, boxing fans or not, tuning in to see this. It should be one of the most-watched boxing events in years.”
