Gabriel Spitzer

SBR News Today is a production of Spokane Public Radio.

Reporting today was contributed by Doug Navornick, Lisa Lineberger, Audrey Nelson, and KUOW's Gabe Spitzer.

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This is SBR.

Tyson versus Paul, November 2024, was the first major sporting live event.

And, you know, I met my partner, Andrew Perrin, I met with Gabe Spitzer and Bella, who was chief content officer at Netflix, Ted Sarandos.

But, you know, Gabe and Bella told us eight months before the fight, this will reach between 65 and 75 million homes.

They knew it eight months before the fight happened.

So we'll pay attention to that.

Gabe Spitzer was on this podcast not too long ago.

I have confidence Netflix is going to do a good job on this.

They're going to spend money to make that production be excellent.

Yeah, I think Netflix learned a lot.

I think Gabe Spitzer and their team, I think they looked at, you know, they've kind of grown as they've gone forward now.

And I agree with you.

Look, I thought they made a good decision.

And I thought, what do you attribute this to other than you had Roman Reigns wrestling and wrestling Penta? I think

this does go to the argument that Gabe Spitzer made recently about when you guys have a big Raw, giving us the lead time to promote it.

They did promote this date for a month with this tournament and crowning it.

I think fans knew that it was like, you're going to get a great crowd in Mexico City, but they also made this show feel like a big deal for several weeks of buildup that I can only imagine this is going to reaffirm their commitment to doing several of these special editions of raw that get more than a week's promotion but like coming out of it to me this is to me makes penta into a really significant player in wwe like he loses the match but i think he's going to come out of this as somebody that is in a much more uh valued position in the company that this is like this did tremendous audience.

Is there a feeling that this is going to kind of catch on with an American audience?

Well, I mean, I'm looking at quotes now from the press release from Netflix, who are televising it, of course, as I mentioned, from the fact that Gabe Spitzer, the vice president of global live sports and entertainment on Netflix, it's Netflix's fifth boxing event.

They started with Jake Paul and Mike Tyson, did 110 million viewers eventually, 65 million, if you recall, for the recently retired Katie Taylor movie.

and Amanda Serrano, their second fight, the first fight at Madison Square Garden, did a million views on DAZN.