Beyoncé provided more excitement than either match Netflix’s NFL debut on Christmas Day.
As she rides into her halftime performance on a white horse, the 32-time Grammy winner on Wednesday, the crowd in her hometown of Houston rocked with a nearly 13-minute performance.
She surprised fans by bringing out Shaboozey to perform “Sweet Honey Buckiin’,” and Post Malone joined her for “Levii’s Jeans.”
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The action on the field did not live up to expectations as the NFL presented four of the AFC’s top five teams.
Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce exposed a flaw in Pittsburgh’s defense during the 29-10 rout of Kansas City in the first game.
The broadcast itself went well and quickly became the second most popular live title on Netflix to date, according to NFL Media.
Lamar Jackson and the Ravens led CJ Stroud and the Texans 17-2 at halftime before Beyoncé stole the show. Baltimore closed out the 31-2 win with Jackson resting most of the fourth quarter.
Mariah Carey opened the football doubleheader with a recorded performance of “All I Want for Christmas is You” and then the two-time defending Super Bowl champion Chiefs defeated the Steelers to capture the No. 1 seed in the AFC.
There were no signs of major streaming issues during the game after Netflix experienced minor blunders at the start of the pregame show. The broadcast started with about 10 seconds of silence as it appeared studio host Kay Adams’ microphone was not turned on.
Beyoncé’s live performance at NRG Stadium would be the biggest test for the streaming giant and it seemed to go off without a hitch.
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Mahomes threw for 320 yards and three touchdowns and Kelce had eight catches for 84 yards and one score as the Chiefs (15-1) earned a first-round bye and home-court advantage in the AFC playoffs. The Steelers (10-6) have lost three straight games and may have to settle for a wild-card spot.
Jackson threw two touchdown passes and ran for a score and Derrick Henry had 147 yards rushing and one TD to help the Ravens (11-5) move into first place in the AFC North, one game ahead of Pittsburgh.
Netflix agreed in May to a three-year contract to broadcast games on Christmas Day. The NFL is expected to give the streaming service one of its biggest days since the site launched in 1998.
Netflix’s 282.3 million subscribers in more than 190 countries were able to stream the games, marking the first time one outlet distributed an NFL game globally. Netflix had the games available in five languages: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and German.
Netflix had problems streaming the fight between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul on November 14. The fight peaked at 65 million concurrent streams, including 38 million concurrent streams in the United States. According to the website Down Detector, almost 85,000 viewers reported problems with interference or streaming in the lead-up to and during the fight.
According to NFL Media, viewers in all 50 states tuned in within minutes of the pregame show going live, and viewers from nearly 200 countries watched the first game. Before the Ravens-Texans kicked off, Netflix reported that it eclipsed the number of concurrent viewers during Christmas for the past four years.
The NFL played its first games on a Wednesday since the Steelers and Ravens were forced to play on Dec. 2, 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The only other time the league has played on a Wednesday since 1948 was in 2012, when the Giants and Cowboys met in the season opener.
The NFL played its first games on Christmas Day in 1971 with a pair of divisional playoff games. The league avoided playing on December 25 from 1972 to 1988, shifting its entire schedule to Saturdays if Christmas fell on a Sunday. There have been thirty games at Christmas since 1989, never more than three on that day. But the NFL went out of its way to schedule two games on Wednesday to accommodate its $150 million deal with Netflix.
This wasn’t the first time NFL games aired exclusively on a streaming service. The league’s Thursday night games are in their third season on Amazon Prime Video, Peacock streamed the Packers-Eagles game in São Paulo, Brazil, in Week 1 and Prime Video will stream a wild-card game. The ‘Sunday Ticket’ package was also moved to YouTube TV last year.
The largest audience for a streamed exclusive NFL game was 23 million on Peacock for last season’s AFC wild-card game between the Miami Dolphins and the Chiefs.
