On Sunday April 16th, over 6 million viewers were tuned in and waiting for the love is blind live reunion special to air at 5pm. Watch parties at home and in bars were in full swing. However at 5pm nothing was happening. Social media was going crazy trying to find out if this was a Netflix error or a personal error. This comes after, Netflix’s controversial new password sharing measures which stops users from using their Netflix account on more than one internet server without paying an extra 8.99.
In the end, after over an hour of waiting only some people were able to watch the reunion that night. Netflix has stated that they will learn from their mistakes and do better next time as they plan to do more live tv. To me, this begs the question, why pay for Netflix live? As more and more streaming services come into play, the conversation about cable tv has come back around, with people often wondering if it isn’t just more worth it to pay for cable rather than 6 different streaming services.
The Love is Blind reunion, live parties happening all over the world, is reminiscent to me of Bachelor/Bachelorette Monday parties often hosted at homes and bars, bringing people together to see who will get next weeks rose. Netflix and other streaming apps have attempted to form this sort of bond between people watching with friends, through things like watch party in which you and your friends can watch at the same time. Bachelor/Bachelorette Mondays have become such a popular thing, that it sometimes because more about the social aspect/having a reason to gather with friends during the busy week to unwind and watch reality tv together.
Other streaming services such as prime video for example have addressed this by collaborating with cable channels. On Prime you can simply add on citytv, stack, starz, etc. to your base prime video account. Which reflects the selling of traditional tv cable packages. This allows prime to have both live and recorded shows, some smart tv’s even now just offer live tv. On Roku, the Live TV app consists of channels such as “Baywatch”, and “Nashville” which play thes popular shows on repeat 24/7. Then they have channels like “figtree” or the “food channel” which play different cable shows/movies. I think other streaming services such as Disney + will begin doing the same as well. Why this 360 back to cable? I think its because we don’t know what we want to watch. Finding the perfect thing to put on has become such a hassle to people that they woul rather just throw on the tv and watch whats on.
As netflix and other streaming services continue to test out their live efforts, I wonder if they will follow in amazon prime’s footsteps and integrate a cable tv aspect into their apps.
More on the livestream fail here
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/04/why-netflixs-love-is-blind-livestream-failed