Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters revealed exactly what went wrong in Sunday’s season 4 live-action “Love Is Blind” special — and how they plan to fix the problem as other live streams continue.
“We’re really sorry to disappoint a lot of people,” Peters said during a pre-recorded first-quarter earnings interview Tuesday. We didn’t meet the standard we would expect of ourselves: to serve our members and be clear from a technical perspective. We have the infrastructure. We just had a bug that we made, in fact, when we implemented some changes to try to improve the performance of our live stream after our last live stream, Chris Rock.[‘s ‘Selective Outrage’] in March. We didn’t see this error in internal testing because it only became apparent once multiple systems interacting with each other were put under the load of millions of people trying to watch Love Is Blind.”
According to Peters, it was 6.5 million people, to be exact, who watched the reunion special hosted by Nick and Vanessa Lachey, which was set to air live at 5pm PT/8pm ET on Sunday night.
Due to technical issues — which started with a web browser UI showing an error message that read: “Sorry for the interruption. We’re having trouble running Netflix. Please check your internet and try again” — the special is already available on Netflix Monday at 12pm PT The Quiet – 19 hours after it was supposed to go live.
“We hate when these things happen, but we’re going to learn from it and we’re going to get better,” said Peters. “We have the basic infrastructure that we need. The good news is that 6.5 million viewers watched and enjoyed the show.”
Sarandos said the operator fully intends to continue using live streaming as an option “when it makes sense creatively” and “helps with the breadth of the content itself”.
“So the reunion show is going to generate news and noise, it really plays better when people can join together,” Sarandos said. “Sure, Chris Rock’s professional demo played very well because there was a lot of anticipation of what he was going to say on that set. So when we get the chance to do projects like that, we love the fact that we have the option to do that. As Greg said, we were disappointed. Great because we couldn’t find the direct product for everyone who wanted it to meet Love Is Blind. But we’re so glad people love the show. It indicates the kind of love this brand has, and the growing love for those brands that aren’t on Netflix. Some of them will Live. These results-oriented shows work a little better and generate a lot more conversation. But keep in mind, like Chris Rock, about 90% of the viewing happened afterward, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was a big event.”
The reunion marks Netflix’s second-ever live event after “Chris Rock: Selective Outrage,” which dropped on March 4 and reached #8 on the streaming weekly top 10 in its first full week of availability. 17.8 million hours watched between March 6-12. The Special Edition not only made the first comprehensive Top 10 list after its initial release on March 4, when it was only available for one day of that issue, but it only made it to the US ratings.
Netflix is set to stream the SAG Awards live in 2024.
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