Hulu subscribers trying to keep up with Anora’s roll though many of the major Oscars categories Sunday missed out on the evening’s climax, when the film won Best Picture and Sean Baker became the only other person besides Walt Disney to win four Oscars in one night. Why? Because the Disney-owned service’s stream ended before the show’s telecast on Disney-owned ABC did.
Disney gave Deadline the following statement: “This evening, we experienced technical and live stream issues on Hulu which impacted some Oscars viewers. We apologize for the experience and will make a full replay of the event available as soon as possible.”
The result was that viewers on Hulu missed the night’s final two awards in which Anora’s Mikey Madison upset Demi Moore to win Best Actress, and Baker — who was also editor, screenwriter and producer on the film — won his fourth statue of the night when Anora took Best Picture.
The issue may lie with the ceremony’s length. At 3 hours and 47 minutes, it was long even for the Oscars. Hulu may have only planned for a 3-hour and 30-ish-minute ceremony, which would explain the 15 minutes or so cut off.
Subscribers began posting shots of their TV screens online.
It wasn’t the first glitch of the night for the Hulu faithful.
An earlier outage, which affected a swath of users just as the first-ever Oscars to be livestreamed was beginning, hampered Disney’s effort to provide a younger-skewing digital complement to its main broadcast on ABC. While the snag was fixed with nearly half of the show left, it was only the beginning of the night’s troubles for the service.
At 6:21 p.m., the streamer’s support page on X told complainants, “Thanks so much for hanging in there! Our team took the necessary steps to resolve this, so you should be all set after rebooting your device. We appreciate your patience!”
An hour later came the announcement, “Our team has identified the issue and users affected should be able to log back in again soon. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
