This Future of TV Briefing covers the latest in streaming and TV for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Wednesday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →
This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how Hulu’s error-prone Oscars live stream exemplifies the development that streaming still needs to undergo to usurp traditional TV.
Downstream effects
The highlight of Mikey Madison’s career coincided with a lowlight for streaming’s development.
“It’s super disappointing. It’s a black eye on all of us in the industry,” said streaming analyst Dan Rayburn.
For anyone who watched the Academy Awards via traditional TV or were tuned out entirely, here’s what happened. Disney decided to livestream the Oscars on Hulu for the first time, and Hulu basically told Netflix, “Hold my beer.”
First, some Hulu subscribers — reportedly 34,000-plus of them, myself included — found themselves logged out of the app early into the broadcast and were unable to log back in (I got logged out from Hulu’s Roku app and ended up having to cast the show from Hulu’s mobile app to my TV). Then, during the presentation for best actress — the second-to-last award of the evening — Hulu’s live stream cut out for some subscribers — again, myself included — and a message popped up on screen saying that the live event had ended. It had not.
Instead what happened is that Hulu scheduled the event to end at a certain time, and seemingly no one was able to or thought to manually override the system when it became clear the Oscars — notorious for running over time — were running late.
“Yesterday evening, we experienced technical and live stream issues on Hulu which impacted some Oscars viewers. We apologize for the experience. A full replay of the event is available on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+,” said the Disney spokesperson in an emailed statement to Digiday.
Hulu’s Oscars broadcast is far from the first example of a streaming service struggling to stream a live event. Netflix alone has run into issues with its “Love Is Blind” live reunion special in 2023 and with the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson boxing match last year. Paramount’s CBS All Access crashed at the start of the Super Bowl in 2021. And even Hulu had cut a major live event early prior to Sunday’s Oscars: the Super Bowl in 2018.
But it’s 2025, and this is still happening. I mean, Netflix seems to have gotten its act together after Paul-Tyson to stream a pair of NFL games on Christmas Day and the Screen Actors Guild Awards a week ago without any significant issue. And it’s not like the issue with Hulu’s Oscars live stream was the service not being able to support a large concurrent audience. This wasn’t a buffering issue.
“This seems to be something different. This seems to be a much bigger screwup,” said Alan Wolk, co-founder and lead analyst at consulting firm TVRev.
The kind of screwup that could cause some people to question how willing they are to count on a streaming service to deliver a live event without issue or whether they may want to revert to a pay-TV subscription at a time when more major TV events, including NFL and NBA games, are becoming more available to be streamed.
“This is one of those things where I think not a lot but maybe 1-2% of people who are thinking, ‘Oh, I don’t really need pay-TV anymore because now I can watch the Super Bowl on Tubi, the Oscars on Hulu’ [may now be thinking], ‘Yeah, you know I think I’m going to hold on to Comcast for another year,’” said Wolk.
“That’s the real discussion to have here,” said Rayburn. “Is this going to force people back to broadcast?”
Or is it going to force the streaming industry to upgrade its systems and infrastructure?
“To the extent streamers are taking on more and more live streaming rights, their actual infrastructure for delivering content to consumers needs to evolve also,” said Moe Chughtai, global head of advanced TV at programmatic ad firm MiQ.
In the case of Hulu’s Oscars stream ending there, that seems like it would be a simple case of having some sort of manual override option so that an employee monitoring the live stream can surmise that the broadcast will exceed its scheduled end time and simply extend it — or just by having a human employee make the call on when to end the live stream in the first place.
Simple as that solution would be, streaming a live event is not so actually simple as going live on Twitch or YouTube. For one thing, a streaming service has to make sure the live stream would work across all of the different smart TV and connected TV devices that a person may use to watch it. Which would help to explain why Tubi’s Super Bowl live stream wasn’t available for people to stream on Samsung smart TVs manufactured before 2018 or through Sony’s PlayStation gaming console.
“Every streaming service has their own default minimum on what they do and don’t support,” said Rayburn. “And because there’s no standards in the streaming industry — no standard hardware, software, bit rate, codecs, aspect ratio, player protocol, we don’t even know what high definition means on the internet because nobody agrees on the same terms. That’s the huge difference between streaming and broadcast.”
In other words, before streaming can fully usurp traditional TV, it still has a lot to learn from traditional TV, as Hulu’s Oscars broadcast has made painfully clear.
“Overall, it’s a wake-up call for all these [streaming services] to make sure that your tech is working. Because the one thing that you could say for broadcast and cable is that, you know, it just works,” said Wolk.
“This feels a little bit like the final frontier on streaming. There’s still work to be done,” said Chughtai.
What we’ve heard
“We have no interest whatsoever in producing our own content.”
Numbers to know
1 billion: Number of people who watch or listen to podcasts on YouTube each month.
$5 billion: The valuation that Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson is seeking for his company in an upcoming funding round.
6.4 million: Number of streaming subscribers that Warner Bros. Discovery added in the fourth quarter of 2024.
5.6 million: Number of subscribers that Paramount+ added in Q4 2024.
5 million: Number of potential subscribers that Fox is eyeing for its upcoming standalone streaming service.
130,000: Number of subscribers that Fubo’s pay-TV service added in Q4 2024.
-253,000: Number of pay-TV subscribers that Dish TV and Sling TV lost in Q4 2024.
40%: Percentage share of The CW’s programming that will be sports or sports-adjacent programming in 2025.
95: Average number of minutes per day that people in the U.S. spend watching programs on their smart TVs.
What we’ve covered
Amazon tightens its grip on TV ads with AI tool built for upfront negotiations:
- Amazon’s Complete TV product provides AI-powered recommendations for advertisers’ streaming spending.
- The tool will make recommendations across Amazon’s own and third parties’ streaming ad inventory.
Read more about Amazon here.
Why creators see Twitch’s monetization and moderation updates as the latest salvo in the livestreaming wars:
- The Amazon-owned livestreaming platform has opened up its subscription and audience-revenue tools to all creators.
- Previously creators had to stream for at least eight hours on seven different days and average at least three viewers per stream to be eligible.
Read more about Twitch here.
News podcast listeners over-index on video podcast consumption:
- News podcast listeners are more likely to use YouTube to watch podcasts than non-news podcast listeners.
- An overwhelming of news podcast listeners surveyed said they watch video podcasts.
Read more about video podcasts here.
Amazon’s impact on the streaming ad market has opened CTV door to small business advertisers:
- Dropping streaming ad prices have lowered the barrier to entry for smaller advertisers.
- Small- and medium-sized advertisers are estimated to spend between 15% to 20% of their overall ad budgets on CTV.
Read more about Amazon here.
How YouTube Shorts revenue compares to long-form video revenue for creators:
- Six creators said their revenues per 1,000 views for Shorts have been consistently beneath $0.20.
- Their long-form video RPMs are typically between $3 and $6.
Read more about YouTube Shorts here.
What we’re reading
The league is looking to take control of its teams’ local TV rights in order to bundle them into a single package to sell to streaming services, according to The Wall Street Journal.
As it works to close its sale to Skydance Media, CBS’s parent company is eliminating its racial, ethnicity, sex and gender hiring goals as part of unwinding its DE&I policies in order to appease the Trump administration, according to The New York Times.
The video platform plans to redesign its connected TV app’s home screen to feature shows and movies from services like Max and Paramount+ that people subscribe to via YouTube’s Primetime Channels program, according to The Information.
Max’s streaming sports package:
Warner Bros. Discovery has opted to push back plans to roll out a B/R Sports streaming subscription add-on and will make sports and news programming available to Max’s ad-free subscribers at no charge while eliminating access for ad-supported subscribers, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The Comcast-owned news network will introduce a subscription-based service for people to watch news videos potentially by the end of this year, according to Semafor.
