Hulu’s Bumpy Oscar Night: Streaming Experts Unpack The Glitches And Assess The Impact On Disney’s Service

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Sunday night’s Oscar telecast started and ended with indelible moments: a stirring Wicked duet and a climactic pair of wins by Anora.

Unfortunately for many Hulu subscribers, both ends of the 3-hour, 45-minute telecast were the exact points when they got blocked from accessing the show due to technical glitches. The outages prompted howls from frustrated viewers on social media and multiple apologetic statements from Hulu about flaws in the first-ever Oscar livestream.

Two days later, the question nags not just at consumers but an entire industry committed to streaming: What exactly caused the stream to fail? Unlike cases like Netflix’s global stream of November’s Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight, scale didn’t seem to be the problem. (At 19.69 million viewers across both ABC linear TV and Hulu, it was a fraction of that of past Oscar shows or February’s Super Bowl.) Instead, authentication – the process of getting subscribers properly logged into the Disney-owned platform – appeared the main culprit. A fix of the initial login programming flaw contained code that caused a number of logged-in subscribers to get booted off the stream about 15 minutes before the show ended, one source familiar with the snag told Deadline.

Hulu declined to expand on its initial statements from Sunday, but Deadline spoke with nearly a dozen streaming experts about the outages, including people familiar with the workings of Disney’s tech stack. The main consensus from those conversations was that even two-plus decades into the 21st century, streaming remains imperfect as the TV business transitions from its “big iron” linear roots to an internet-protocol future.

“Anything that’s live is just incredibly hard,” Wim Sweldens, co-founder and CMO of streaming tech firm Kiswe, noted in an interview. Livestreams are “exciting, but things can go wrong,” he added, particularly at the beginning and the end of an event. “It’s like a plane taking off and landing. Those are the riskiest things an airplane does. Once it’s flying, it’s sort of flying OK.”

Two main steps are required when a viewer attempts to access a livestream: authentication (identifying the user) and authorization (determining the user’s permission, especially in regard to geography and payment). Live events are hard to predict, making planning an inexact science, and the “digital clock” of streaming often clashes with the more fluid reality of programming that might end at 43 minutes past the hour or other odd intervals.

One senior exec at Brightcove, a major provider of streaming technology to a number of clients (though not Disney or Hulu), said authorization remains “a chokepoint on the internet.” He compared the task of authorizing viewers to managing the entrance of a physical venue. “The turnstile gets backed up,” he explained. “As a company providing a livestream, you have to really think through that turnstile because then it cascades. Think of a real concert, where people are waiting to get in and shoving against the doors. It can make it difficult to get in and keep the doors open.”

Disney has invested aggressively in streaming infrastructure, acquiring control of the pioneering Major League Baseball entity BAMTech several years ago as it acquired full control of Hulu and prepared to launch Disney+. Last summer, the company hired 20-year Google and YouTube veteran Adam Smith as Chief Product & Technology Officer, Disney Entertainment and ESPN. Live events have proliferated on Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu, generally without issues, though the 2018 Super Bowl experienced outages for select subscribers to Hulu’s pay-TV arm in a glitch that received press coverage at the time.

“Disney has definitely invested in real-time capabilities,” one streaming veteran told Deadline. “But this is a legacy problem for the whole industry. You’re building a digital framework on top of linear television.” The Brightcove exec noted that linear TV “isn’t perfect, but it doesn’t have to be.”

Streaming promises programmers a one-to-one relationship with viewers, instead of the “one-to-many” relationship of the broadcast TV era. That means a dramatic increase in the ability to target select viewers with advertising. The tradeoff, though, is that glitches sometimes occur.

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A password-sharing crackdown recently initiated by Disney, following in the path of Netflix, which has phased one in successfully, was raised by some experts as a potential contributor to the login issues. Others strongly disputed any potential connection.

One high-level exec who ran and launched streaming operations in legacy media companies said the Oscar snag is “kind of a ‘meh’ event” for Hulu, “just given the scale of it. It’s high-profile in showbiz circles, but an average customer isn’t going to see it as a black eye.”

The Brightcove exec agreed, saying, “Those that use the internet as their primary medium for entertainment, they just have intrinsically more patience” with technical issues, given the offsetting benefits of convenience. “They’re not going to see a gigantic drop-off of subscribers on Hulu because of this. They’re just not.”

The optics and timing of the glitches, though, were far from ideal. On Oscar Sunday, as Disney was getting set for its first simulcast on Hulu, word emerged that the company’s exclusive negotiating window with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had expired. While Disney could still re-up and extend its 50-year relationship with the Oscars before the deal ends in 2028, other companies could get in the mix. The field has a number of large-scale streaming rivals to Disney, including Netflix and Amazon, each of which has made a push into live events and award shows. Netflix carries the SAG Awards and Amazon’s Prime Video airs the Country Music Awards.

On social media, embers still are glowing from the angry bonfire that roasted Hulu on Sunday night, attesting to the downside risk of moving TV onto the internet.

“Hey @hulu your system kicked me off the livestream right before Best Actress, thanks for NOTHING,” fumed film writer and historian Farran Nehme in one typical complaint. “This never happened when I just had cable, @hulu. You better be preparing to give us all the rest of the year for FREE.”

Although streaming outages continue to occur across the industry, they appear to be growing less frequent. Tubi, Fox’s free streaming outlet, handled more than 15 million concurrent viewers at last month’s Super Bowl without faltering, as some rivals had predicted they might. Prime Video, Netflix and NBCUniversal’s Peacock all have cleared major hurdles with exclusive streams of NFL games without flaws, defying skeptics.

“The technology is getting more mature,” Sweldens said. “There are more companies that have the capabilities and have dealt with it. Companies will hit one of these issues and learn from it.”

Still, he continued, the complexity of livestream delivery are daunting. “It’s not like 50 years ago when we put up rabbit-ears antennas on top of our TVs.”

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