Oops — Hulu ended its Oscars stream early, before the biggest award
Hulu's stream of the Academy Awards ceremony ended before the Best Actress and Best Picture Oscars were announced.
Hulu’s live stream from Hollywood’s biggest night was full of glitches that left fans frustrated, including login issues and a premature ending.
Academy Awards viewers streaming via Hulu encountered a note across their screens at about 10:30 p.m. Eastern on Sunday: “Thank you for watching. The live event has now ended.” There was just one problem — the Oscars were very much still going and the biggest awards of the night were just around the bend.
Users said once they hit the erroneous message, they were unable to log back on and catch the announcements for the “Best Actress” and “Best Picture” categories.
The Oscars — hosted this year by Conan O’Brien — are an ABC production and, in turn, were broadcast on local ABC channels nationwide. The event was available simultaneously as a live-streamed Hulu special for the first time, according to Disney, which owns ABC and Hulu.
Philadelphia-headquartered Comcast previously owned a 33% stake in Hulu, but sold the last of its share to Disney last year for $8 billion.
“It definitely felt like the time is now to make sure our big event programming is available to all viewers wherever they prefer to watch,” said Rob Mills, Walt Disney Television executive vice president of unscripted entertainment , citing the company’s success with simultaneous streams (known as simulstreams) of Dancing With the Stars in recent years across ABC broadcasts, Hulu, and Disney+.
But simulstreams are only successful when they work and don’t send a flock of movie buffs spiraling across the internet. To make optics worse, Hulu’s stream ended during Anora director Sean Baker’s speech accepting the Best Director award while he spoke about the need to support production companies that prioritize sending films to theaters rather than direct-to-streaming models. The irony wasn’t lost on viewers.
Why did the Hulu stream end early?
So, what exactly prompted the Oscars stream to cut off early on Hulu? It had to do with scheduling.
Hulu gave the Oscars a set ending time of 10:32 p.m. according to The Verge — and that’s right when viewers started getting booted out of their streams. It appears Hulu’s livestream didn’t account for acceptance speeches running long and the typical amount of wiggle room usually allotted for live awards shows. In reality, the awards show ended closer to 10:45 p.m.
“This evening, we experienced technical and live stream issues on Hulu which impacted some Oscars viewers,” Disney said in a statement. “We apologize for the experience and will make a full replay of the event available as soon as possible.”
Earlier Sunday evening, Hulu noted that some viewers were also experiencing login issues and only marked the problem as resolved after 9 p.m. — more than two hours after the Academy Awards had started.
What else happened at the Oscars?
Both awards that Hulu-streamers missed were scooped by the indie film, Anora, including Mikey Madison winning “Best Actress” and the film taking home “Best Picture.”
Doylestown-set drama The Brutalist earned Adrien Brody his second “Best Actor” Academy Award for his role in the locally set historical epic. The Brutalist won three of its 10 nominations for “Best Actor,” “Best Original Score,” and “Best Cinematography.” West Philly’s own Colman Domingo, who starred in Sing Sing, was up against Brody for “Best Actor.”
Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo kicked off the awards show with an Ozian medley of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” “Home,” and “Defying Gravity.” Zoe Saldaña became the first American of Dominican heritage to win an Academy Award for her supporting actress role in Emilia Perez. Wicked costume designer Paul Tazewell made history as the first Black man to win an Oscar for costume design.
Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg introduced a tribute performance to the late Quincy Jones, headlined by Jersey’s own Queen Latifah.