Netflix is in talks to stream Naoya Inoue's next super fight, which means the company that spent most of a decade arguing it had no interest in live events has decided that the cheapest entry into a live-rights position in Japan is a super bantamweight. Inoue holds all four major belts at 55.3 kilograms and is the highest-profile active fighter in Japanese combat sports; DAZN and Amazon Prime Japan have both bid for pieces of his recent schedule. Netflix entering the conversation does one thing. It re-prices the fight for everyone already in the room.

Netflix has not discovered boxing. It has discovered that Inoue is the lowest-cost live-event acquisition play in Japan, where streaming subscriber growth through library content has decelerated and where a single live event moves retention in ways a back-catalog cannot. DAZN's Japan operation has held combat sports positioning for six years; the audience it built -- the people queuing for noodles and checking odds on their phones in arena concourses from Tokyo to Nagoya -- is now the audience Netflix has decided it needs. DAZN must now defend a rights calculation it made before Netflix was a live-sports bidder. When the next Inoue promotion is announced, one of Netflix or DAZN will have signed; the other will know what live rights now cost in Japan.