Tonight was the highly anticipated launch of HBO’s House of the Dragon, with the series premiere streaming exclusively on Bell Media’s Crave.
However, it seems the intense demand overwhelmed Crave’s servers, as customers were unable to stream at 6pm PT/9pm ET.
“We’re sorry. We have detected an error. Please sign in again to start watching or access your account,” read one error message. Others kept seeing their Crave accounts sign out, or ask them to purchase an active subscription to start streaming. Many on Twitter and Reddit kept saying they were logged out of Crave and were not able to log back in.
In our own tests, we experienced these same sign-out errors. As of writing, streaming House of the Dragon works after the initial demand has subsided.
Just prior to the launch, the @CraveCanada account was telling customers “your patience will be rewarded”, just minutes before the service seemingly failed to handle the sudden demand.
Trending number one on Twitter in Canada was of course everyone talking about House of the Dragon. But trending in fifth place was “Crave”, consisting of numerous tweets from frustrated customers seeing the streaming service fail to deliver the premiere of House of the Dragon.
WTF @CraveTVHelp I turn on my tv to watch HOTD and even though I never signed out Crave asks me to sign in and keeps saying Sorry, we are unable to contact the service right now. You knew this premier was going to be a big deal right? #refund #painandsuffering
— Suzanne Pountney (@Squeezi88) August 22, 2022
Crave never fails to disappoint. #Cravedown #HouseOfTheDragonHBO
— Pratik (@pratieekk) August 22, 2022
https://twitter.com/autumncorvus/status/1561528995434446848
Many criticized Crave for not being prepared to handle the surge in viewership, knowing well in advance House of the Dragon was set to debut tonight.
One shining star was the fact Crave’s app on Apple TV 4K was indeed offering a 4K Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) stream, as confirmed by on-screen developers tools shared by one Reddit user, showing 3840 x 2160 resolution with 60 Hz refresh rate and video range as SDR.
Crave is not alone in dealing with House of the Dragon crashes tonight. HBO Max also crashed for some subscribers using Amazon’s Fire TV devices, confirmed HBO.
Back in June 2019, when the Toronto Raptors won Game 6 in the NBA Final, the Bell Fibe TV app shut down in the final minutes, leaving some Fibe TV customers to miss out on the end of the game. Bell similarly saw streaming issues with Game 5 as well.
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HBO should be able to sell directly to Canadians and not have to only go through BELL. This is not the first time BELL has problems with streaming.
I’m on HBO MAX watched in 4K last night a lot Canadian sign up how get it directly on HBO MAX using trick VPN.
Discovery+ Canada will Eventually get HBO back from BELL Crave once they add HBO Hub next year in Discovery+ Canada same goes for SHOWTIME will be pull out from Crave sooner or later will added to Paramount+ Canada
Bell is finished Crave will be gone year in and so can’t wait.
Good to know!
Can’t watch via Apple TV, but I could with Crave app on iphone.
I watched the first episode. Very disappointing.