Academy Awards Viewers Left Frustrated by Multiple Outages, Early Cutoff of Oscars Ceremony via Hulu
Subscribers to the Disney-owned streaming service missed the final two awards of the night.
Yesterday evening was the annual biggest night in Hollywood, as the stars and filmmakers of 2024’s most acclaimed movies gathered at the Dolby Theater on Hollywood Boulevard for the 97th Annual Academy Awards. But not everyone watching at home was thrilled with how the event went down, as a number of viewers tuning in through the Disney-owned Hulu streaming service saw multiple interruptions to the broadcast.
What’s happening:
- Some Hulu subscribers watching the Academy Awards live stream yesterday were met with multiple outages– both at the beginning and the end of the broadcast.
- The first outage was not resolved until nearly two hours into the event, and forced Hulu users to reboot their devices and log back into their accounts before they could resume watching. The second, seemingly unrelated outage occurred before the final two awards (for Best Actress and Best Picture) were given out at the ceremony. Deadline theorizes that Hulu may have only accounted and scheduled for three and a half hours of content, and the broadcast exceeded that by more than 15 minutes.
- However, these outages did not affect all Oscar viewers. The party I personally attended here in Southern California watched via Hulu and we were able to enjoy the entire ceremony without interruption.
What they’re saying:
- The Walt Disney Company (via Deadline): “This evening, we experienced technical and live stream issues on Hulu which impacted some Oscars viewers. We apologize for the experience and will make a full replay of the event available as soon as possible."
- Deadline: “Hulu subscribers trying to keep up with Anora’s roll though many of the major Oscars categories Sunday missed out on the evening’s climax, when the film won Best Picture and Sean Baker became the only other person besides Walt Disney to win four Oscars in one night. Why? Because the Disney-owned service’s stream ended before the show’s telecast on Disney-owned ABC did."