Fox exec questions Netflix's unverified Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson numbers

Friday night's Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight has sparked a separate skirmish: legacy media vs. new technology.

After Netflix issued a press release claiming that 60 million households tuned in for the main event on Friday night, Fox Sports president of insights and analytics Mike Mulvihill had this to stay, via Sports Business Journal: “Nielsen is fully capable of producing a U.S.-only viewership number for Netflix on a next day basis, but they can’t do it if Netflix doesn’t ask for it. And why would [Netflix] ask for it when the entire Internet runs with their worldwide number no questions asked?”

We couched our item on the numbers as a Netflix claim, adding that they didn't use the traditional average-per-minute audience figure. That's the traditional way of measuring viewership. Mulvihill goes a step farther, not-so-subtly suggesting that the numbers are fugazi.

The number might be real, but who knows how it was calculated? Did, for example, Netflix treat each effort to reload the stream as a separate view?

Mulvihill is right. The only apples-to-apples number for viewership comes from Nielsen. Without that, or any other third-party verification, the fox is the one counting the hens.

We'll see what kind of chicken inventory system Netflix incorporates for the pair of Christmas games it will be broadcasting.