Netflix Details ‘Love is Blind’ Reunion Glitch; Will Offer More Live Events ‘When it Makes Sense Creatively’
If you tried to tune in live to watch the “Love is Blind” reunion special that Netflix aired on Sunday, April 16, you’re already well aware that it did not go the way the company intended. Users were locked out of the livestream for more than an hour, and most did not get to enjoy it in the live format that the streamer had intended to offer it in.
Company executives addressed the issues during its first quarter earnings call on Tuesday. Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters insisted the problem was not caused by a hardware issue, but rather a software issue that didn’t become apparent until Netflix tried to roll out the livestream to its millions of global users.
“From a technical perspective, we’ve got the infrastructure,” he said. “We had just a bug that we introduced. Actually, when we implemented some changes to try and improve live streaming performance after the last live broadcast — Chris Rock in March — we just didn’t see this bug in internal testing because it only became apparent once we [had] multiple systems interacting with each other under the load of millions of people trying to watch ‘Love Is Blind.’”
The stand-up comedy special “Chris Rock: Selective Outrage” was Netflix’s first-ever livestreamed event, and though it too saw a few technical issues, there was nothing like the widespread outage that accompanied “Love is Blind: The Live Reunion.” Despite that fact, the reunion was still watched by 6.5 million people by the time of the earnings call, though executives declined to share how many of those viewers watched as close to live as possible and how many streamed it on-demand in the two days following.
There’s no doubt that the latter category of Netflix users was higher. The streamer has to get more of its users accustomed to thinking of its service as a place where they can watch live events; when they’re working as intended of course. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos noted during the call that around 90% of audiences watched “Selective Outrage” on-demand after the livestream had concluded. Despite that fact, he said that the company would continue to roll out more live offerings at a deliberate pace.
“We want to use live when it makes sense creatively, when it helps the content itself,” Sarandos explained. “So a reunion show that’s going to generate news and buzz, it really does play better live when people can enjoy it together. Certainly, the Chris Rock stand-up show played out so well because so much anticipation for what he’s going to say in that set. So when we have the opportunities to do projects like that, we like the fact that we have the option to do it.”
That sounds as if the company wants to pull back and make sure it doesn’t see a glitch like it did with the “Love is Blind” reunion ever again. Such issues can be a big blow to a company’s reputation, and Netflix has to make sure that whatever its next live broadcast is, it goes off without a hitch. The Netflix brand will insulate the company from the worst of the blowback this time, but if it happens again, the specter of user dissatisfaction will loom large.
The disaster that was the attempt to livestream “Love is Blind: The Live Reunion” does not spell the end of livestreams for Netflix, but the company will likely wait until it has everything ready beyond a shadow of a doubt from a technical standpoint before it offers another live event.
Netflix
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