The fans sat down Sunday night ready to see a live Love is blind meet up and learn if season favorites Tiffany and Brett really are “forever,” as Netflixown Twitter bio proclaimed. But the streaming giant caved in during its big moment, unable to deliver the drama in real time to its viewers. After about 90 minutes, Netflix canceled it and opted to record the meeting and release It’s Monday afternoon.
“To everyone who stayed up late, woke up early, gave up your Sunday afternoon…we are so sorry that the Love is blind Live Reunion did not go as planned,” Netflix said in a statement. cheep. “We are filming it now and we will have it on Netflix as soon as humanly possible. Again, thank you and I’m sorry.” Netflix did not respond to a request for comment on the cause of its live streaming difficulties.
Netflix discontinued TV, which was doing pretty well when it came to live streaming, only to bring it back recently, presenting its subscribers with a live stream. Chris Rock stand-up special in March. The move toward live content is widely seen as a push to help Netflix differentiate itself in a competitive field of streaming video, particularly as the network has taken unpopular steps to generate revenue by promising reduce password sharing. But live programming on stream is more difficult than streaming, and Netflix is far from the first streamer to fall victim to technical hurdles, especially when it comes to in-demand content.
“You could say it’s so popular that it’s failure after success,” says John Kendall, a media distribution analyst at consultancy Omdia. Highly anticipated content, like a hit reunion show, heavily marketed by Netflix, is what the network needs to stand out. But too many people trying to access the program may have led to the problem. Netflix has [just] encountered this problem, but they’re not the first and they won’t be the last,” says Kendall.
While broadcast TV makes live TV look simple, streamers lag behind because they use a different technique. Broadcasting sends a one-to-many signal. Think of this as the output of a traditional radio or television signal, and then many people tune in by turning on a television and selecting the channel. But the broadcast is a unicast series, or sending a signal to a single device on demand. That creates more opportunities for things to go wrong, whether it’s creating the content, streaming it to servers, or delivering it to users, Kendall says. More people watching means more bandwidth is needed. And if streamers have early demand, they may be in trouble.
Netflix in particular faces challenges here, Kendall says, because it only has one way to distribute its content: through a Netflix app on a TV, computer, phone or tablet. Competitors like HBO have people who tune in through apps, but also those who use HBO through their cable subscriptions, diversifying the way the channel can deliver content at peak times.