Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters revealed what exactly went wrong with the live “Love Is Blind” Season 4 reunion special on Sunday — and how they plan to fix the problem with other live broadcasts moving forward.
“We’re really sorry to disappoint so many people,” Peters said during a prerecorded Q1 earnings interview Tuesday. “We didn’t meet the standard that we expect ourselves: to serve our members and just be clear from a technical perspective. We’ve got the infrastructure. We had just a bug that we introduced, actually, when we implemented some changes to try to improve live-streaming performance after the last live broadcast, Chris Rock[‘s ‘Selective Outrage’] in March. We just didn’t see this bug in internal testing because it only became apparent once we put multiple systems interacting with each other 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, that did watch the reunion special hosted by Nick and Vanessa Lachey, which was set to stream live at 5 p.m. PT/8 p.m. ET on Sunday night.
Due to technical issues — which began with the web browser user interface displaying an error message reading: “Pardon the interruption. We’re having trouble playing Netflix. Please check your internet and try again” — the special actually became available on Netflix on Monday at 12 p.m. PT — 19 hours after it wassupposed to stream live.
“We hate when these things happen, but we’ll learn from it and will get better,” Peters said. “We do have the fundamental infrastructure that we need. The good news is that ultimately 6.5 million viewers watched and enjoyed the show.”
Sarandos said the streamer fully intends to keep using live as an option “when it makes sense creatively” and “helps the breadth of content itself.”
“So a reunion show that’s going to generate news and buzz, it really does play better live when people can join together,” Sarandos said. “Certainly, the Chris Rock standup show played out so well because there was so much anticipation for what he was going to say in that set. So when we have the opportunity to do projects like that, we like the fact we have the option to do it. As Greg said, we were super disappointed to not be able to come across with the live product for everyone who wanted it on the ‘Love Is Blind’ reunion. But we’re super thrilled people love the show. It does point to the kind of love for that brand, and for the growing love for those unscripted brands on Netflix. Some of them will be live. Those results oriented shows do play out a little bit better live and they do generate a lot of conversation. But keep in mind, like Chris Rock, about 90% of the viewing happened after but that doesn’t change the fact that it was a big event.”
The reunion marks Netflix’s second-everlive event after “Chris Rock: Selective Outrage,”which dropped on March 4 and reached No. 8 on the streamer’s weekly Top 10 list in its first full week of availability. 17.8 million hours were viewed between March 6-12. The special did not make the first overall Top 10 list after its initial March 4 launch, when it had only been available for one day of that count, but did land on the U.S.-only rankings.
Netflix is set tostream the SAG Awards livein 2024.
