The Academy Awards were about to announce the winner of the coveted Best Actress prize when suddenly, the show’s live feed on Hulu went out for many subscribers (including this writer) without warning or explanation.
Users suddenly saw a blue screen that read “Thank you for watching! This live event has now ended. You may exit playback and select something else to watch.” But of course, the show had not ended. There were still several major awards to go, including the top prize for Best Picture of the year.
If you (or me, I did this) tried to reload the feed, it sent you to an old Oscar preview show. If you went back to the Hulu.com — where the Oscars telecast had previously occupied the top of the page — there was no longer any mention of the Academy Awards. If you searched for “Oscars” on Hulu, it took you to a trailer for the show.
This issue was widespread enough that social media was flooded with subscribers complaining and sharing their own images of their busted feeds.
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Hulu has yet to comment on the reason for the issue, but The Verge noted that Hulu had previously listed the live stream as running from 7PM ET to 10:32PM, which is when the feed suddenly ended for many users. (The Disney owned subscription service had over 53 million subscribers at the end of 2024.)
Said many users were understandably upset. “I just cancelled and got a refund for last month. Hit them in the wallet,” read a post from one Reddit user. “The most epic fail imaginable,” said another disappointed customer. Others complained that they tried to contact customer service and couldn’t even get through to even register their frustration.
This was not even the only problem Hulu users encountered during tonight’s stream of the Academy Awards. Earlier in the evening some users faced a “tech glitch” that blocked them from logging into the service, and thus from watching the start of the awards. That issue was supposedly resolved, per Deadline, around 9PM ET — roughly two hours after the man show had begun.
And then, about 90 minutes later, the whole show cut off from many Hulu customers.
(Anora’s Mikey Madison won the Best Actress prize, by the way. And ironically, only a few minutes before that, Anora director Sean Baker had used one of his acceptance speeches to remind people that movie theaters are still the best place to see a film. Do any of them broadcast awards shows too?)
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The Academy Awards hold the kind of dramatic potential we can only hope our favorite movies measure up to, the rare public event where things are more interesting if something goes wrong.
Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky