The Tyson fight, that is -- but not just on the fight.

I'll leave most of the analysis of the fight itself to those who follow boxing more-closely, but will note that Jake Paul allegedly said that he "was nice" to Tyson (more or less), which is silly.  You were paid to knock him out if you could, and he was paid to knock you out if he could -- or at least that's what the viewing public was sold.  If it wasn't what you were going to do then like so much else in today's society the watching public was sold a bill of goods.  I hope you and boxing in general pay for that in the future (in the form of a destroyed revenue stream.)

I'll focus my attention instead on the production and distribution which was, to put it mildly, horrible.

We'll start with audio.  I've done this for people before.  Its a bit of an art, as is (of course) camera operation, direction and video mixing.  To say that it was done "poorly" would be an insult to those who do it poorly.  It was horrible; the balance was wildly off between background and announcer volume, EQ was bad, micing (whether selection or placement on the announcers) was hideous, mixing was worse and the result was often unintelligible garbage.  A middle school play would sound better.

Video production wasn't much better.  I've done that too.  Camera angle selection, the jump cuts, just plain poor.  Shooting live sports is again an art, but one that plenty of people are pretty good at.  This wasn't.  Critical angles were missed during punches that shouldn't have been.

Production stunk like skunk, to be precise in four words, and that's leaving off the trashy stuff everyone expects in so-called "professional" boxing (pre-bout preening, grand entrances, etc.)  That sort of looked like "professional" wrestling..... I thought one was a sport, the other entertainment?  Maybe today, not so much.

When it came to content delivery, however, it was clear that Netflix's "production" lack of acumen was actually the high point of their competence.  If you recall many years ago I went after them in spades during the so-called "net neutrality" wars because their strategy (and the foundation of their "earnings" during those times) was to force last-mile carriers to eat their long-haul bandwidth requirements.  They ultimately lost that war despite Obama's Net-Neut position and have stuck racks of disks and servers all over the place very close to local distribution centers, such as at the head end offices of cable companies.  That's as it should be; there's no "peering" argument to be had for a service like Netflix because the other guy gets no value in the other direction, which is the entire premise of no-charge peering -- you get value from my customers, and I get value from yours; the differential is small enough that its not worth trying to figure it out and generate a bill in either direction.

But when you want to do live events that doesn't work.  At all.  Now you have to deliver the entire content stream to everyone watching all at once from wherever it originates to every single consumer.  The cable company still has their requirement but yours is now not to send down the new movie at 2:00 AM when everyone is sleeping -- nope, you have to send it right now to each of those head ends and the capacity has to be there to do it.

Well, it wasn't.  Whether that's because Netflix can't do math or they have deliberately not purchased it previously (because you don't need it when the content is on hundreds or thousands of servers in said cable headends) doesn't matter.  It wasn't there and that was obvious as the pixelation and then, for a huge number of people, complete failure to deliver the streams occurred -- and what made it worse is that while you could exit your Netflix app and restart, and usually get it back, automated reconnection by their app failed basically every time so if you didn't manually exit and restart the app you eventually got either a spinning "loading" thing that never moved or just a black screen -- or an error saying there was a "connection problem" (and implying it was on your end, which it wasn't.)  Worse, when you reconnected they were trying to cheat those bandwidth requirements by resuming from where you lost coherence (presumably they were locally caching in their racks at carrier head-end locations to do so) which meant you were now minutes behind the actual action and if you scrolled back to "live" you got hosed again immediately.

"Live" means live guys, not "well, you can watch from the start where we've cached it at your local cable company headend when we can't deliver what we told you we could."

I tried to switch to my phone from a Sony 4k player that I usually use for streaming and that was fruitless as well -- and it certainly wasn't my Internet link, which has enough capacity to handle 40 such streams at once and was working perfectly fine to everything else. 

Good thing I don't pay directly for this hot mess -- I get "basic" Netflix "free" because I'm a T-Mobile customer -- because if I had been paying for it that'd be the end of me as a paying subscriber.  Oh, its just one time people will say -- yeah, but guess what -- competence matters, this was a seriously promoted event that many people really did want to watch and, well, a huge percentage of them didn't, at least not usably.  In other words everyone, including Netflix, set a high bar themselves -- and failed.

I don't know if Netflix charged silly money for bars and other commercial establishments (as is common for various other things like MMA fights) but if they did the howling from them is going to be quite interesting, along with what I expect to be more than a few attempts to charge it back and, if resisted, I bet it draws lawsuits as well -- and should.

Netflix may be a perfectly-reasonable way watch shows and such "on demand" these days -- something I don't enjoy and thus have no reason to pay for -- but they clearly do not have the chops to handle live events whether in the production or content delivery side of the equation.

Period.