Hulu’s stream of 2025 Academy Awards was a disaster
Hulu’s stream of 2025 Academy Awards was a disaster
The Disney streaming service is in damage control mode after tech issues marred its first-ever stream of the Oscars.
While the 2025 Academy Awards were a dream for movies like “Anora” and “The Brutalist,” for Hulu, the evening was a nightmare. Disney’s general entertainment platform live streamed the awards ceremony for the first time, and despite its best efforts, the broadcast was plagued with glitches and technical issues.
Key Details:
- Many Hulu customers were greeted with an error message when they tried to log into Hulu to watch.
- Hulu’s stream of the ceremony also cut off before the final two awards were given out.
- The issues are similar to problems experienced by Netflix during a live stream in November.
It was a rough start and a rough end for Hulu’s Oscars stream. At the beginning of the ceremony, many Hulu users who tried to log into their accounts to watch were greeted with an error message that locked them out. This problem wasn’t fixed until approximately 8 p.m. ET, over an hour after the broadcast began and after a huge chunk of the ceremony had already passed.
Related: How to stream the 2025 Academy Award winners
“The issue is now resolved and impacted users are able to log in,” Hulu posted on social media on Sunday night. “There was a technical issue with a login system which we identified and fixed.”
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Hulu also cut the live stream off early, before viewers had a chance to see the Best Actress and Best Picture awards handed out. The streamer could only apologize for these continued problems, and pledge to get an on-demand version of the awards out to customers as quickly as possible.
“This evening, we experienced technical and live stream issues on Hulu which impacted some Oscars viewers,” Hulu said in a statement to Deadline. “We apologize for the experience and will make a full replay of the event available as soon as possible.”
The problems with the end of the stream may have had something to do with the ceremony’s extended run time; the Oscars were only slated to run for three and a half hours, but the actual telecast reached 3 hours and 47 minutes in total. Still, the Oscars almost always run over their allotted time, and it’s an eventuality that Hulu should have been better prepared for.
Not that Hulu is the only streaming giant to have problems with live content. Hundreds of thousands of Netflix subscribers experienced issues when trying to watch the boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson in November 2024.
As the TV landscape continues to change, more and more streaming services are willing to try to live stream major events, and more experience will give them better answers when these problems crop up in the future. But they’ve got to figure out these problems soon, lest customers begin to think of streaming as an unreliable medium for major live programming.
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