If you were among the many people who tuned into Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul live on Netflix last weekend, chances are you'll have faced some major technical issues.
The streaming platform seemingly wasn't prepared for such a huge influx of live viewers, leaving people frustrated with the picture quality and seemingly endless buffering issues. For pro wrestling fans, there have been concerns about whether Netflix is properly prepared to deal with RAW on a weekly basis.
Talking on the Morning Buzz podcast, WWE CCO Paul "Triple H" Levesque shared his take on the issue and whether he's concerned about the Monday night show also becoming a victim of buffering.
"I don’t want to flex about it, but it was buffering on my end because I was on a plane watching it," The Game explained. "The buffering was expected on my side. We were flying back from TV watching the fight and the signal was wonky. I thought, ‘We’re 40,000 feet in the air, it should be.’ Then, seeing it online everybody saying it was buffering."
"You start putting 60 million households all at once on a streaming service, if our first-night buffers and they come and say there were 60-70 million households watching, I’ll be good with the buffering," he admitted.
While WWE is unlikely to draw anywhere near that sort of viewership, Netflix will need to make sure it's prepared because constant issues like the ones fans faced during this boxing match will drive people away.
In the same interview, Triple H was asked about running WWE and whether he often hears from the wrestlers who typically take to podcasts of their own to share how much better they think the product used to be.
"Nobody actually texts me during the show because they know I'm not going to answer, for the most part. It's interesting the different points of view. I know guys across many different generations, and I think there are some older performers that look at the way kids perform today and they say, 'They're just not doing it right. They don't need to do all this.' I get that, but it's the way kids consume it today. There is a saying about when things start to leave you in life. The first thing to go is music. How many people, as you see them get older, 'Music today sucks. Back in my day, that's when they made good music. People put their heart and their soul into it and there was real emotion there.'"
"No, you're just old, dude. Yeah, the stuff was great in your generation and you learned it a certain way, but the kids today learn it a different way, and what they see and what they think is cool, then that's what you need to give them. I can't control that. I learned this 30 years the hard way. It is in no way shape or form about what I want. It's about what they want. If it becomes about what I want, then the show will die. It is about what they want and that overall big picture."
It's a compelling argument and this sort of attitude is where Triple H's WWE is succeeding where Vince McMahon's so sorely failed...