The highly anticipated debut live coverage of NFL matches on Christmas Day by Netflix encountered a lot of technical challenges in its early opening minutes.
The pregame display started as Kay Adams introduced the broadcast to Netflix viewers. While she was doing the introduction, her microphone was silent for the first 10 seconds.
While it seems that the glitches were over, the stream again was disturbed as Mina Kimes’s speech was abruptly cut to an ad for Squid Game Season 2 before it then continued as if no error was made.
The pregame, which went for 2 hours, happened before the Chiefs vs. Steelers game came up at 1 p.m. and the Ravens game against the Texans at 4:30 p.m. It was reported that it cost Netflix $150 million to have these two games featured on their platform, with a plan that was made for not less than one game in every holiday of the next two seasons.
Last month’s game between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson generated a lot of controversy after widespread buffering issues, and Netflix had promised professionalism, but these early glitches left a poor first impression and cast doubts.
Despite the early technical glitches, the streaming quality for the pregame show otherwise held steady, while Netflix expects traffic to rise as games kick-off.