‘A hardware failure in our production truck’ — Amazon Prime Video’s Heat vs Hornets live stream has major outage in overtime

• Amazon's NBA stream cut out with less than a minute on the clock
• The game was offline for close to two minutes
• Amazon blames a hardware error on the outage

With less than one minute on the clock in overtime of a tight Heat vs Hornets NBA game, Amazon Prime Video’s stream cut off, leaving viewers staring at a technical difficulties message for close to two minutes.

At arguably the worst time for an outage to happen, basketball fans watching from home missed Charlotte extend its lead, but thankfully were able to tune in before the game concluded — to see Charlotte’s team eliminate Miami’s from the play-in event, blocking them from entry to the postseason playoffs tournament.

As you might expect, the outage infuriated viewers. Social media threads like this one are full of complaints that “Streaming sucks,” and another exclaims, “It shouldn’t be this hard to watch games.”

Even LeBron James was angered by the issues, “Tell me the game didn’t just cut off?!!? Am I trippin?? WTH.”

For many, the outage, plus other frustrations like commentator audio being slightly ahead of the video, and the loss of the ability to pause or quickly rewind on streaming, confirmed their fear that Amazon would be inferior to the old home viewing experience.

It also follows other live streaming woes from Netflix and its Skyscraper Live event, another example of a platform proving that its VOD doesn’t necessarily translate to a premium real-time viewing experience.

As for what caused the NBA game outage, a spokesperson for Prime Video said the problem was due to “a hardware failure in our production truck,” and that it’s conducting a “thorough internal review” into the outage.

We’ll have to wait and see if the streaming situation continues for Amazon, but hopefully, this is simply an early teething problem to resolve.

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