Oscars fail to take the streaming award

The 2014 Oscars took a few steps into the digital age that were perhaps a little late to the podium and they produced mixed results. In an Academy Award first, the Oscar telecast was streamed live in real time, however the streaming from the key broadcaster ABC was plagued by technical glitches.

 For the Oscars, ABC partnered with eight cable operators, the largest being Comcast, in eight markets: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Houston, Raleigh-Durham, N.C., and Fresno, Ca.

The decision to stream would have been pushed by the recent success of the Super Bowl XLVIII which became the most-viewed live-streamed sporting event in US history, attracting an average audience of 528,000 viewers per minute. This was a significant a 52 percent uplift from  2012 which was the first year the game streamed online.

Dramatically, the Oscars did not get to experience those traffic highs. The ABC live video stream derailed for the majority of the broadcast across the US. An ABC spokesperson said that was  “due to a traffic overload greater than expected. The outage did spark use of another digital platform with traffic redirected  to Twitter, where ABC  endured the viewers wrath all night.

Back on traditional TV sets the Academy Awards was watched by an average 43 million people turning it  into the most-watched telecast of the awards show in 10 years.

The prior most-watched Oscars was in 1998, scoring  55 million people who  tuned in to see "Titanic" take best picture.

In another first, this year’s  Oscars also broke Twitter records, prompted by a single event rather than the entire show. Host Ellen DeGeneres posted a now notorious selfie with a group of A-List guests that garnered a flash of over a million retweets, which promptly broke Twitter briefly.

In total, over 1 billion Twitter TV impressions were accrued across the night, according to ABC. Unfortunately these figures were also prompted by the domestic streaming backlash.

Despite the ABC network’s technical challenges, it was an important first step for the traditional broadcaster to garnering real-time viewing online to bolster not only audience numbers but new adverting streams and retransmission broadcasting fees.

Research firm SNL Kagan estimated that network broadcasters will collectively earn more than US$3 billion from such fees in 2014 and forecast that figure to escalate to $7 billion by 2019.