Hulu Offering Free Live TV For Users Affected By Super Bowl Outage

Hulu will offer a free month of live TV to users who were affected by the Super Bowl outage, the company said in a post on Wednesday.

Hulu users unexpectedly lost connection during the final moments of the 2018 Super Bowl game against the New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles. Users went on Twitter to complain about the outage, which also affected NBC and PlayStation Vue viewers.

Hulu apologized to customers via Twitter on Sunday, saying the company was “aware of a technical issue that is impacting some of our NBC feeds,” and recommended users to close and relaunch their Hulu apps.

“Apologies for the disruption this evening,” Hulu said afterwards to upset users on Twitter. “While the interruption could not have come at a more important time, we are confident we can prevent this in the future.”

Hulu did not reveal how many people were affected by the outage last Sunday night. Some customers on social media said they saw “error” messages, and that restarting the app like Hulu recommended did not work.

On Tuesday, Hulu shared an official response in a post on Reddit in which it explained that the extensions on the platform did not work properly.

The company wrote:

“During the Super Bowl last night, some of our viewers were booted out of the stream around 7:00PM PST. While most of our viewers never saw any issues and/or were able to rejoin, we know a number of you were affected, and we’re sorry.

To give some context, every event you watch on Hulu has a predetermined start time and end time. In many cases, games run over this window and then need to be extended. Last night, our extensions didn’t work correctly - and we’re looking into why that happened.

In the meantime, we wanted to be upfront with you and apologize. For some viewers, we fumbled at the end of the 4th - and that’s not acceptable, we know.”

Hulu encourages users who were affected to contact the company to “make things right.” In an edit to the post, the company also announced it was offering a free month of Hulu’s live TV to eligible viewers. The platform said it has been sending emails to affected Super Bowl viewers regarding the offer.

Hulu’s $40 live TV streaming service was launched last spring and is still in beta. However, the company Senior Vice President of Experience Ben Smith said this week that the platform will release “exciting changes” this spring.

The company made deals with 21st Century Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS, Turner Networks, A+E Networks and Scripps Networks for its plan. The service includes more than 50 channels. The Hulu live streaming option has some strong competitors in the field, including YouTube’s live TV service and Sling, as well as other plans like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.