Love is Blind fans were shocked Sunday night when many couldn’t watch the heavily-promoted reunion on the streaming platform.
The reunion was set to play out live for the first time in the dating format’s history.
Doing so would allow fans to watch along and avoid spoilers.
Unfortunately, those plans imploded when the stream was delayed by 75 minutes for the people who managed to watch it on Netflix Sunday night.
For everyone else, the episode didn’t get posted until Monday afternoon, meaning spoilers were already everywhere, leaving a bad taste for those who couldn’t watch.
Netflix Co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters opened up about this week’s debacle while speaking about the strong Quarter 1 results.
“We’re really sorry to disappoint so many people. We didn’t meet the standard that we expect ourselves to serve our members,” Peters, according to Variety.
“From a technical perspective, we’ve got the infrastructure, we had just a bug that we introduced when we implemented some changes to try to improve live streaming performance after [Chris Rock’s live comedy special] in March.”
Peters added that “we just didn’t see this bug in internal testing because it only became apparent once we put sort of multiple systems interacting with each other under the load of millions of people trying to watch Love Is Blind.”
At the time of the earnings presentation, Peter revealed that the pivotal episode that wrapped up the season had been streamed 6.5 million times.
Whether that figure will grow substantially, we don’t know, but our best guess is that many people still have to watch the episode after trying it on Sunday.
We should get more numbers in Netflix’s Weekly Top 10 to better indicate how the episode is performing.
Love is Blind was Netflix’s second live event, so with new technology, there are always some teething issues.
Hopefully, if the service wants to try out this type of content again, it will be a far more worthwhile approach for fans.
What are your thoughts on the response from Netflix?
Do you think the show should avoid live reunions going forward?
Hit the comments.
Paul Dailly is the Associate Editor for TV Fanatic. Follow him on Twitter.