Hulu biffs Oscars live stream at worst possible moment

Maybe Adrien Brody’s acceptance speech was a little too long. That’s the only explanation we can find for a rash of streaming outages across Tinseltown and the wider tinsel-watching world. Yes, Hulu ended its Oscar stream just before the Academy presented awards for Best Actress and Best Picture. Reports of Hulu crashing just after Sean Baker picked up the award for Best Director and just before Mikey Madison’s win for Best Actress began flying around the internet like it was the last episode of The Sopranos or something. On social media, Hulu subscribers are posting “Thank you for watching” notices, indicating that the Oscars are over even though the biggest award of the night was still to come. Apparently, Hulu didn’t have an overrun for the Academy Awards, which flies in the face of Oscars history, inspiring this writer to ask: Was this the first AI-powered Oscars stream? How else can we explain why the streamer blocked out the Oscars with computer-brain accuracy and did not prepare for the Oscars to run long? It’s the Oscars.