During Tyson’s fight in November 2024, Netflix saw a record 65 million streams and the broadcast began to stutter. Around a year and a half later, it has patent US 12652426 B2 for a technique against this problem.
Down Detector at the time recorded almost 85,000 reports of outages, and viewers complained on X and Bluesky. The patent is in the names of Xiaomei Liu and Joseph Lynch, two of the three engineers on the Live Origin server.
Separate reads and writes
The origin server is the point from which live stream segments are distributed to the CDN network. When tens of millions of requests hit it at once, it decides whom to serve first.
The advantage over the previous approach is summed up in the patent document, as analyst Dan Rayburn quotes it. “At least one technical advantage of the disclosed techniques relative to the prior art is that the disclosed techniques can more effectively handle requests to a live origin server during traffic surges by separately handling read and write requests and by prioritizing more important requests over less important requests.”
Priority for the live edge
Netflix’s engineers described the same logic in December 2025. The origin “prioritizes live edge traffic over DVR traffic during periods of high load”, meaning it gives priority to viewers watching the live broadcast over those who go back to the recording.
When storage is under pressure, less important traffic receives a 503 error and an instruction to wait, because the origin “instructs Open Connect to slow down and cache identical requests for 5 seconds by setting a max-age = 5s”. Reads and writes run along separate paths on dedicated servers, so the surge of viewers does not endanger the continuous writing of new stream segments.
Flooding of requests for segments that do not yet exist is handled from the cache, with a success rate above 90%.
Netflix first built Live Origin on AWS S3 cloud storage, but for live broadcasting the strict two-second window for retries, where every write is critical, was not enough. It moved to its own solution built on the Apache Cassandra database and the EVCache cache, which can handle reads above 200 Gbps without that harming writes.
According to the engineers, the same system has been running in production for over a year.
A bet on live broadcasting
In the first quarter of 2026, Netflix aired more than 70 live broadcasts, including its first regional one, the World Baseball Classic for Japanese subscribers. This year, advertising revenue is expected to reach around $3 billion, double last year’s figure, and Netflix reports more than 4,000 advertisers.
A live broadcast keeps an audience in one place at one time, and that is the scale advertising needs.
The next big event heads to Britain
The next major test will be a heavyweight fight in the United Kingdom between Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua, which Netflix is preparing for this year. Competition for live sport is pushing prices up.
According to Ampere’s analysis, streaming services will spend around $14.2 billion on sports rights in 2026. Prime Video, with an estimated $3.8 billion and 27% of this spending, has overtaken DAZN for the first time, which had led since 2018. The battle is also being fought in Europe, where DAZN lost the German Champions League rights to Paramount+.
A large share of football and other sports rights sits right here, so the same infrastructure test awaits every platform that buys them.
Netflix is thus turning live broadcasting into its own protected infrastructure. The outage at Tyson’s fight showed that handling such a surge of viewers at once is an engineering problem that money for rights cannot solve. The patent turns that lesson into something Netflix intends to keep to itself.
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