riding a white horse in his half-time appearance, 32-time Grammy winner rocked his hometown Houston crowd with a nearly 13-minute performance on Wednesday.
He surprised fans by bringing out Shabuzzi to perform “Sweet Honey Buckiin,” and Post Malone joined him for “Levii’s Jeans.”
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Action on the field did not live up to expectations as the NFL featured four of the AFC’s top five teams.
Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce exposed a flaw in Pittsburgh’s defense during a 29-10 rout of Kansas City in the first game.
According to NFL Media, the broadcast itself went well, and quickly became the second most popular live title on Netflix to date.
Lamar Jackson and the Ravens led C.J. Stroud and the Texans 17-2 at halftime before Beyonce stole the show. Baltimore cruised to a 31-2 victory with Jackson resting most of the fourth quarter.
Mariah Carey opened the football doubleheader with a taped performance of “All I Want for Christmas is You,” and then the two-time defending Super Bowl champion Chiefs defeated the Steelers to earn the No. 1 seed in the AFC.
There were no signs of any major streaming issues during the game after Netflix experienced minor glitches at the start of the pre-game show. The broadcast began with about 10 seconds of silence because it appeared that studio host Kay Adams’ microphone was not on.
Beyoncé’s live performance at NRG Stadium was supposed to be the biggest test for the streaming giant and it seemed to be going 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 a score as the Chiefs (15-1) earned a first-round bye and home-field advantage in the AFC playoffs. The Steelers (10-6) have lost three straight 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 a TD to help the Ravens (11-5) move into first place in the AFC North, over Pittsburgh. One game ahead.
Netflix agreed to a three-year deal in May to broadcast the Christmas Day games. 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 can stream the games, the first time an outlet has distributed an NFL game globally. Netflix had games available in five languages - English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and German.
Netflix There were problems Continuity The Mike Tyson-Jack Paul fight On November 14, the competition reached 65 million concurrent streams, including 38 million concurrent streams in the United States. According to the website Down Detector, about 85,000 viewers experienced outages or streaming issues leading up to and during the fight.
According to NFL Media, viewers from all 50 states tuned in within minutes of the pregame show going live, and viewers from nearly 200 countries watched the first game. Before Ravens-Texans began, Netflix reported that it had eclipsed the most tuned-in viewership of any Christmas in the last four years.
The NFL was playing its first games on Wednesday since the Steelers and Ravens were forced to play on December 2, 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The league was played on a Wednesday for only the second time since 1948 when the Giants and Cowboys met in the season opener in 2012.
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 1972-88 and moved its entire slate of games to a Saturday if Christmas fell on a Sunday. There have been 30 games on Christmas since 1989, with no more than three on that day. But the NFL went out of its way to schedule two games Wednesday to accommodate its $150 million deal with Netflix.
This was not the first time NFL games have been broadcast 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 Sao Paulo, Brazil in Week 1 and Prime Video will stream the wild card game. Also, the “Sunday Ticket” package moved to YouTube TV last year.
Last season’s AFC wild-card game between the Miami Dolphins and Chiefs had the highest audience for an NFL game special streamed on Peacock at 23 million.