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Brandon Riegg has spent the better part of a decade trying to make live TV on Netflix. He joined the company in 2016, after stints at NBC, ABC and VH1, where he had worked on shows such as Dancing with the Stars, The Voice, and America has talent. All of those shows were the kind of unscripted reality fare he was hired to bring to Netflix, but they also incorporated things like live voting to make everything feel more urgent and interactive. “I just feel that if we’re really trying to be the preeminent entertainment service in the world,” Riegg tells me, “we should have all the tools at our disposal.”
So Riegg and Bela Bajaria, another longtime TV executive who joined Netflix at the same time and is now its chief content officer, began making the case around Netflix for why it should invest in the technology needed to do live content work. Over and over, they had the same question: What do you want to do with it? And for years, Riegg says, they haven’t had a great response. “I’ll go, ‘Well, I don’t have anything specific right now, but I want to be able to jump on things that require live capabilities if those things come up.’
For years, that shrug of an answer didn’t work. But somewhere around two years ago, the energy changed. “We continued to talk about how we want to have something for everyone,” he says, “and there is a requirement of living for some programs. For us to do these things, for us to buy these things, we need to have this functionality.”
Netflix has spent the last two years slowly learning how to do live programming and live streaming. It started with a special comedy by Chris Rock last March, which was a technical success and a cultural success. A few weeks later, he did a live Love is blind reunion show, which was such a spectacular disaster that the reunion was filmed and later released. Then there was a live baby gorilla feed at the Cleveland Zoo, a weird golf event that paired Formula 1 drivers with PGA pros, the SAG Awards, a tennis exhibition, a Tom Brady roast, and the slightly off-kilter John Mulaney night show. Everyone is in LA.
All that was, in some ways, just practice. Because the real tests of Netflix’s streaming prowess came this fall. First, the Jake Paul/Mike Tyson fight in November, which the company says is being looked after more than 65 million Netflix subscribers around the world – and they had a lot technical difficulties and delays of his own. And then, two Christmas NFL games, complete with a halftime performance by Beyoncé. The NFL is the biggest and the most precious entertainment properties in the United States, and football is the most guarded thing on television from a mile away. Netflix is many things, but it is also now a live TV network. And you didn’t hit the football.
When Netflix struggled to follow the Paul/Tyson fight, many viewers were surprised. Netflix has been streaming stuff forever… shouldn’t he be good at it? When I asked this question to Elizabeth Stone, CTO of Netflix, she says that live streaming is very different from streaming. Perhaps more different than Netflix itself originally thought.
“When we’re streaming video on demand,” says Stone, “we have the benefit of planning ahead. That content is in its final format; the video, the images, the audio are in well-packaged files, and they’ve already after all the production steps, the coding steps, they are ready to be placed on the servers of the world through our content distribution network and through the Internet service providers. This is not trivial work, obviously, but it is the work that Netflix has been doing for two decades. He saw every problem, came up with every solution. “So when a member clicks play,” says Stone, “we’re really ready for them to click play.”
When you’re filming and streaming live, you still have to do all of those things and more, but you have to do it in real time. “The feed from the camera goes to the production truck, it goes to signal ingestion, it goes into the cloud to be encoded. Then we send that through our CDN, through the internet service providers, to land on your TV or your phone. And we have seconds to do this. Live streaming, even to one person, is difficult. It’s doable, sure — TV networks, streaming services and tech companies do it every day — but it takes work.
Then there’s the whole “65 million people” thing. Stone laughs when I bring it up. Netflix builds and tests and plans as much as possible, she says, both with real events and by flooding its infrastructure with fake traffic. “But there is no laboratory in which you can simulate what happens to our systems when 65 million people are watching at the same time.” Even on Netflix’s busiest days, it doesn’t get that kind of traffic all at once.
Stone breaks the Netflix system into two parts. That’s a generalization, she says, but it’s close enough. “When you log into Netflix and scroll through the home page, and watch trailers and decide what to watch, that’s supported by AWS servers.” Netflix is a huge customer of Amazon’s web services, which are the backbone of most of the internet at this point. That’s a huge traffic burden just to have tens of millions of people going through the app at the same time, but AWS scales pretty well and Stone says that part of Netflix has held up even during the struggle.
Once you press play, however, the system switches to Netflix’s Open Connect system, which is generally considered. the best in the streaming business. Netflix invested heavily in its own infrastructure when it started streaming, but, again: 65 million people. “You could argue that any company would have faced challenges on this kind of scale,” says Stone. “We have these tight connection points between our servers, the Open Connect devices, and what I would call the last mile that the ISP gives to the devices. All of that was overloaded during the fight.”
Among the things you can’t know until the start of an event is who will be watching, where they will be, and what else might happen. The internet is a finite thing, with only so much bandwidth available in the cables that connect things; if an event is unexpectedly popular in LA, it will struggle in LA even if it does well elsewhere. “Think of it as the difference between a truck delivering 100 bottles of water versus having to run a live water hose to 100 people at once,” Fastly CEO Anil Dash wrote recently. “One problem is to move some parts from one place to another, the other problem is to keep a live stream running at high volume on a massive scale. When there is not enough water that is supplied to all those tubes, everyone gets a little less.”
Stone agrees that the pipes are the challenge. “All the streamers out there,” he says, “we’re all doing: how much bandwidth is there? And do we need bandwidth at the same time that a lot of other streamers need bandwidth?” It’s not like Netflix can dig trenches or run more cables along your phone lines – certainly not for Christmas, anyway – so all it can do is try to optimize the system as best as possible.
Since the Paul/Tyson fight, Stone says Netflix has been trying to increase its capacity and control the flow of bandwidth more effectively. “We’ve increased our Open Connect servers, and many of the ISPs have increased the capacity they bring to the table,” he says. They are particularly focused on the places that were overloaded during the fight, although it does not specify which places those are. Internally, the team is also working on optimizing the algorithms that decide how to prioritize traffic and bandwidth.
There probably won’t be as many people watching Christmas football as there were for the fight. It’s possible that a Netflix live event will never be this big again – there aren’t many unique cultural moments that command such an audience. But Stone says she’s glad to have seen the system so wild especially and stressed because now the team knows what’s going on. “It would have taken us a lot longer to get these learnings if we turned the dial a little bit from some of the previous live events,” he says. Throwing the lever to the end, he thinks that Netflix can now be ready for almost anything.
Still, to be clear, even Stone won’t go so far as to promise that football games will go perfectly. All she will say is that she loves a challenge.
Even if the Christmas games are going well, the Netflix team doesn’t have much of a break. On January 6, it will broadcast the first episode in a new weekly series: WWE Raw, the top fight show. Netflix bought the rights to the show for $5 billion and is responsible for streaming it for the next decade. In 2027 and 2031, Netflix will be too streaming the FIFA Women’s World Cup. Both have great built-in interest, and both drive great buzz around the world. They are also recurring programs, which keep subscribers subscribed. This stuff matters to Netflix.
It’s also just simple math. All the most popular things on TV now are live events: sports, award shows, that kind of thing. These are the shows that command the highest audience and the highest advertising rates, and Netflix is now quickly trying to build its own advertising business. That’s why Amazon paid for the rights to the NFL, why Peacock went all-in on the Olympics, and why even the price of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade went up. In an increasingly shared entertainment landscape (which is, of course, partly Netflix’s fault), live TV to watch is more valuable than ever.
Riegg, who oversees all these content choices, is adamant that for Netflix, live and sports are not the same thing. He seems animated by the idea of uniting people, of creating communal moments where everyone looks at and talks about the same thing at the same time. Netflix, of course, is perhaps the most responsible company fine that monoculture by making huge libraries of content available to everyone, everywhere, all the time. But Riegg thinks the platform should bring back some of that classic live TV energy. “Remember the space jump Felix Baumgartner Red Bull?” he asks me. “I remember that everyone in the office was looking at this – something where there is always the specter that something can happen. We all experienced this at the same time.”
Netflix is interested in buying more of these events, Riegg says, but he also wants to create them. Which brings Riegg to his current big question: “What is our version Dancing with the Stars? Or what is our version America has talent?” That’s what Netflix’s unscripted team is working on now — taking familiar formats and adding live elements. Because Netflix is so big, and so global, Riegg thinks it has a chance to do something really new. “What if we had Voice, and everyone in the world will be able to opine and weigh in on who should win? It’s a different level of community visualization.”
I told Riegg that I was long, immensely dedicated American Idol fan, and his eyes widen. “We will never see another idol,” he says, “as to the gap between Idol and the second place performance. But we can certainly try to say, what is the next iteration of this? It’s pretty clear that he and the team have some ideas, although Riegg won’t tell me what they are. We just have to know all together, live.
