The 2025 SAG Awards continue a big complaint about the streamer’s live events. During Jane Fonda’s Lifetime Achievement Award speech, her microphone consistently glitched and was a distraction from her otherwise powerful message. The 2025 SAG Awards, which took place on Sunday, February 23, 2025, streamed exclusively on Netflix for the second year in a row. Despite the increase in Netflix’s live event output over the past year, the technical issues on the platform remain noticeably present.
While this SAG Awards mishap isn’t just a Netflix problem, it is certainly being noticed more because of Netflix’s recent history with these types of issues. Viewers of last November’s Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight will remember the frequent buffering problem. It’s become commonplace for people to expect problems with Netflix’s live events, and 2025 SAG Awards errors with teleprompter readings throughout the night and bad sound problems during Jane Fonda’s speech don’t help avoid these complaints.
The 2025 SAG Awards’ Sound Problems Continue Netflix’s Live Events Mishaps
Netflix Still Hasn’t Figured Out How To Put On A Flawless Live Broadcast
The sound issues at the 2025 SAG Awards continue a streak of mishaps and mistakes for the streaming giant when it comes to live events. While none of the technical errors at the 2025 SAG Awards stopped the momentum of the night, they were distracting enough for viewers to wonder, what exactly is the problem with Netflix and its live events? Small mishaps are bound to happen during live broadcasts here and there, but Netflix has developed an unfortunate track record of constantly including these errors, even in critical moments.
I would understand if these types of issues frequently happened on a smaller platform but Netflix is quite literally the industry standard when it comes to streaming services, making these common errors inexcusable. There’s no “fix it in post” element to live television, a key point that Netflix hasn’t seemed to grasp yet, which makes for frustrating and downright sloppy viewing experiences. It makes the prospect of Netflix ever hosting a top-tier live broadcast such as the Super Bowl or the Oscars almost laughable.
Netflix’s 2025 SAG Awards Issues Are Essentially Awards Show Tradition
At This Point, They’ve Become A Running Gag & An Unfortunate Expectation
Technical errors like these happen quite often during awards shows (who can forget the La La Land Best Picture fiasco?), which can be chalked up to the beauty of live TV. It’s become a bit of an awards show tradition, especially in recent post-COVID years, for live awards ceremonies to be less pristine and more messy in general.
It should also be said that the SAG Awards were previously aired on TNT and TBS, which didn’t have as many technical fumbles as Netflix has had in its two years hosting the event. Fortunately, not one second of Jane Fonda’s speech was lost due to Netflix’s missteps at the 2025 SAG Awards.
