Netflix is betting that a Spanish creator’s boxing event can become a global live franchise. The platform has acquired exclusive worldwide rights to the next three editions of La Velada del Año (The Event of the Year), the spectacle built by Ibai Llanos and his community of digital creators. Starting in 2027, the event leaves its Twitch-first roots for a subscription window on Netflix.
The deal
The 2027, 2028 and 2029 editions will run on Netflix. Until now, Llanos’s Twitch channel was the primary home; this year’s sixth edition expanded to YouTube and TikTok before the shift to Netflix. Netflix says the fifth edition in 2025 reached a peak of 9.3 million concurrent viewers.
The event has grown from a 2021 concert-hall boxing match into a hybrid of sports, music and entertainment that draws internet personalities from Spain and Latin America. Average viewership climbed from nearly 1 million in 2021 to more than 6 million in 2026, per Netflix data.
Why Netflix is buying now
The acquisition lands days after Netflix secured 2030 FIFA World Cup rights for Spain and Andorra. That sequence matters: live events are becoming a retention and acquisition lever in local markets, not just a global add-on.
For media planners and entertainment marketers, the numbers change how creator-led formats should be valued:
- 9.3M peak concurrent viewers is a scale few traditional sports broadcasts in Spain can ignore.
- 6x average audience growth since 2021 shows creator IP can compound when distribution widens.
- Multi-year exclusivity turns a community event into a scheduled appointment for subscribers.
The trade-off to watch
Llanos framed the Netflix move as a scale play that protects the community: “Bringing it to Netflix for the next three years allows us to make it even bigger without losing what makes it special: the community that makes it possible.” That is the central risk in licensing creator IP—platforms get reach, but the format can lose its participatory feel if the audience follows a person rather than a service.
For buyers, the immediate opportunity is live reach tied to young, Spanish-speaking audiences and a built-in social distribution layer. The test is whether Netflix uses La Velada as a one-off event or builds a broader slate of creator-led live programming across Latin America and Europe. It already broadcast Supernova: Génesis from Mexico this year, suggesting the pattern may repeat.
What to do about it
Treat creator-led live events as a separate inventory category, not as niche Twitch content. If you are planning budgets, the 2027 Netflix window gives three years of predictable live minutes against a young, engaged Spanish-speaking audience—measurable and sponsor-adjacent.
Do not assume reach disappears when the primary platform changes. The data shows the opposite: distribution expansion coincided with average audience growth from under one million to over six million. The community travels when the format stays true.
Source: C21media
