Hulu's Oscars Streaming Debut Was An Instant And Embarrassing Failure

For the last few weeks, the Hulu streaming service has been bragging about being the first-ever home to livestreaming the Oscars. The audience for the Academy Awards has been on a steady decline for years — a whopping 50% in the last decade according to Bloomberg — and catering to cord cutters seemed to be a great way to get folks to tune into the biggest show celebrating cinema. Netflix has been incorporating more live-streaming events in recent years, and has been so successful that even major live-event programming like WWE has trusted them to be their new home. Hulu, as one of the banner properties of Disney, had a huge opportunity to prove that they too could hold their own with the clear winner of the streaming wars. Unfortunately, Hulu's Oscar streaming debut was an instant, embarrassing, and colossal failure.

Some folks, like /Film's own Jeremy Smithm were lucky enough to have a stream that was "laggy from the start" before dropping sometime after Kieran Culkin won the Best Supporting Actor statue for his role in "A Real Pain," while /Film writer Danielle Ryan was able to access the stream on the television app, but not through the browser. One look at the "Hulu" search on social media reveals thousands of furious movie lovers who are furious that they're paying for a service that straight-up is not working. The Hulu accounts are posting memes, updating "A Real Pain" on their app as an official Oscar-winner, and providing updates of awards won in between what I can only assume are frantic social media managers replying "Having issues logging in? If so – we're on it! Our team is actively investigating, and we hope to have things back up and running soon," through tears.

Meanwhile, yours truly is writing this article while watching a random TikTok user livestream the ceremony from their living room couch with their phone set on a tripod behind them, which means I get to enjoy the show with the added play-by-play of a person who admittedly is "only rooting for 'Wicked' to win because it's the only movie they saw" providing color commentary.

I don't want to be mad at Hulu, because of all the streaming services, I sincerely believe that they have one of the strongest libraries of original content. The fact that they're the home of 20th Century Studios' films following their theatrical releases (and direct-to-streaming titles like "Prey") is worth the price of a subscription alone, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't have to fight the urge to rage-cancel my account somewhere around Sean Baker winning the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for "Anora" and not being able to hear him thank the sex worker community because the TikTok streamer was too busy thanking people for sending her tips for streaming it for other people struggling to watch.

As of publication, it's been over an hour and a half since the Oscars started, and there's still no sign of the stream becoming available. We've said it before and we'll say it again, streaming is not only now just like cable, but it's somehow worse. At least when it came to live events, I didn't have to worry about suddenly losing picture unless there was an active tornado warning going off — and even then, Midwest broadcasters apparently could hold it down a hell of a lot better against a natural disaster than Hulu's servers against a gaggle of cinephiles. If Hulu wants to maintain competitive status against the likes of Netflix, they're going to have to figure out how to handle live broadcasts, or ABC may need to follow through on the rumors of selling the streaming rights next year to Netflix.

Hey, at least I can check out the /Film winners list as it updates so I'm not totally left in the dark.

UPDATE: To add insult to injury, Hulu crashed yet again for many users who were able to watch the ceremony without previous issue around 7:30 pm PT / 10:30 pm ET, before the awards for Best Director and Best Actress (which went to Sean Baker and Mikey Madison for "Anora," respectively) with an alert that the broadcast had "ended." Yikes.