Netflix is reassuring investors that it does in fact have the technical infrastructure to host live broadcasting events after a season reunion of the Love is Blind cast on Sunday was delayed for over an hour due to technical issues.
During today’s Q1 earnings call, co-CEO Greg Peters reiterated a previous apology for the issues, saying the problems were “just a bug” inadvertently introduced after the service’s last live broadcast:
To everyone who stayed up late, woke up early, gave up their Sunday afternoon… we are incredibly sorry that the Love is Blind Live Reunion did not turn out as we had planned. We’re filming it now and we’ll have it on Netflix as soon as humanly possible. Again, thank you and…
— Netflix (@netflix) April 17, 2023
“From a technical perspective, we’ve got the infrastructure,” he said. “We had just a bug that we introduced actually when we implemented some changes to try and improve livestreaming performance after the last live broadcast, Chris Rock, in March. And 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.”
Peters went on to reiterate that Netflix has the technical infrastructure, saying that 6.5 million people watched the broadcast. He then tossed to his fellow co-CEO, Ted Sarandos, who noted that the company will continue to experiment with live broadcasts for similar types of programming, but also pointed out that 90% of the viewership of the aforementioned Chris Rock special happened after the live event itself was over.
Peters and Sarandos were put on the spot today after the season four reunion of the Love is Blind cast was delayed for over an hour Sunday night as viewers were repeatedly given error messages or booted from watching the show. This was only the second of Netflix’s experiments with live events, with the first being Chris Rock: Selective Outrage on March 4 of this year.
In tandem with Netflix’s earnings today, we also learned more details about its plans to roll out a password sharing crackdown in the next few months, and that it’s shuttering its more than two decade old DVD rental program this fall.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
