Outage at the Oscars: Producing Live Streams Is Harder Than it Looks
The Oscars were broadcast March 2nd on Disney-owned ABC and streamed on Hulu. However, the livestream was reportedly beset with problems.
“Yesterday 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,” a Disney spokesperson told ADWEEK.
FOX-owned free streaming provider Tubi had buffering issues during the Superbowl stream. Paywalled Netflix had widely reported issues with the Tyson-Paul fight. Whatever the technical issues, all of these big-leage failures make it clear to a worldwide audience that knows nothing about live streaming production, that streaming is not easy. Even the media giants have streaming problems.
These recent media-worthy stumbles help to combat what I'll call "Zoom-ignorance"--as in, people use Zoom and think "it just works." They become very complacent because they are not paying any attention to the image quality or timing issues, or the fact that their "streaming event" was to 5, or 30, or 500 people and completely different from a "large" event.
In these big title broadcasts, people are very critical of the image quality, the audio sync, the frame rate. In a fast-paced fight, dropped frames and stutters make a big difference. Low resolution video and connection issues are aggravating. In the Oscars, Hulu cutting the stream before the Best Picture was even awarded? Unforgivable.
But in Zoom, if the talking heads you're watching are being shown at less than 15 fps, or at a low 360p resolution because of data rate issues, nobody notices, or cares. This lack of concern creates a false sense that streaming "always works," because there are still big technical issues, but they are being masked by the technology (not just zoom--most all platforms can deal with variable frame rate and frames missing data), and its ignored by the majority of users depending on the content being streamed.
When producers have the discussion about live streaming, it's important to address the elephant in the room: that there can be problems. Like Hulu, Like Netflix, etc. Or worse--I was in the middle of a 6-week conference when the start of our livestream coincided with a catastrophic collapse of Vimeo's OTT platform.
Do you have a backup plan in place? What's the fallback position? What contingencies are in place? We needed to move over 1,000 participants to a different platform. We managed to do it in about 15 minutes, including about 5-7 minutes of troubleshooting and just trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Is it my browser? Hmm, no. Maybe it's my computer? Hmmm. Are others experiencing it? Let's see if we can work around it? Is it affecting the audience? Who's the point person to make the decision to switch? Who sets it up?
We already had a secondary line of communication: a group text chat. This separate line was essential because our in-app communication also tanked when access to Vimeo went down. But I can tell you that it's hard to try and test the problem while also being messaged by 5 other people. After this event, we established a protocol to have a backup up and running. We established a point person, and delegated duties as to who would be in charge of what to perform a platform move.
Do you have a process in place to handle a platform failure? Maybe just postpone the stream? Or maybe the production is too big and that's not an option. It's up to us as producers to use the examples of Hulu and Netflix to remind clients that successful streaming is not as easy as it looks and impress upon them the importance of having backup streams, and fall-back protocols in place to make the event a success even if there's a content delivery network failure.
There will be a time when these OTT systems are reliable enough. But we are not there yet. The the "big guys" are having problems, even with their wealth of resources, is reminder that we all need to plan accordingly.
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