Disney TV Chief On Oscars Hulu Issues & Conan

Walt Disney TV’s Rob Mills headed up this year’s Oscars telecast at ABC and, in a post-ceremony discussion with Variety, has spoken about what went right and wrong with the 97th Academy Awards ceremony.

One of the biggest issues happened over on Hulu. The Oscars ceremony this year was the first to be streamed live on Hulu, but various subscribers ran into issues during the simulcast.

The biggest one was that the livestream shut down after the show went 30 minutes over its scheduled time – meaning Best Actress and Best Picture awards weren’t shown. Mills said the situation was unfortunate:

“This is not my area of expertise, and obviously you feel bad for the people who were trying to watch the show – it’s unfortunate. I think the best thing to do is look at it as a way to figure it out and make sure it doesn’t happen again. It’s not the first time this has happened [in streaming] and probably won’t be the last…but we are at least moving into this world where we are meeting viewers where they are.

At the Walt Disney Company as a whole, our superpower is we have a broadcaster, we have a premium streamer, so anywhere you want to watch this show, we want to make sure you can watch this. And for the most part, that works out great. It works spectacularly well with Dancing With the Stars. Onward and upward, and next year will be a better experience.”

One thing that went very right on the other hand was host Conan O’Brien. The ceremony has struggled with hosts for years, some famed comedians often struggling with the gig. O’Brien, on the other hand, took to it like a duck to water and earned near-universal raves for his work.

Mills says “Conan absolutely nailed it” and is very happy to have him back if he’s interested: “I know we would love to have him back. I don’t know if this counts as an official offer, but I really hope he wants to come back. It was a joy and a privilege, and probably the only sort of methadone I could have for not being able to do the show with Jimmy Kimmel.”

ABC has an agreement in place to broadcast the Oscars through 2028, but Bloomberg is reporting that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is considering a change when that contract is up with the group said to be envious of Netflix’s recent handling of the SAG Awards.

Meanwhile the ratings are in and just under 18.1 million people tuned into ABC’s telecast of the ceremony, a reported 7% decrease from the year before. That total comes from a combination of Nielsen’s measurement of linear viewers on ABC plus Disney’s own data regarding Hulu live streams – it marks the ceremony’s first viewership drop in four years.

Though far from the all-time low of 10.4 million viewers in 2021 during the pandemic or the 16.6 million who watched in 2022, it’s behind the 18.8 million who tuned in for the 2023 ceremony and 19.5 million who checked out last year’s ceremony.

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