They better get it right for Christmas Day and the 2 NFL Games. Otherwise the Grinch will be firing a lot of technical staff.
It doesn't make sense to say "couldn't handle the bandwidth". The bandwidth is what's provided -- like the diameter of a pipe. They couldn't handle the load. You could say they couldn't handle the bandwidth requirements.
All that said. I had only one brief buffering episode while viewing a Netflix stream via YouTube.
And now you know why they did this. Practice practice practice. Only one way to see how your infrastructure can handle that many live connections. So now they know where their problems are and have a month to fix them.