For the most part, I’ve done alright being a “cordcutter.” I have an AppleTV, which is signed into my parents’ Netflix account, my girlfriend’s dad’s HBO and Hulu accounts, and my own iTunes account. Most of my friends also operate with this patchwork of logins — whether they use an iPad, their phones, or a computer.

Live TV has always been the weakest part of my TV set-up. Those big, must-watch-when-they’re-happening events are also the hardest to stream to millions of people. See: 2014's Oscar meltdown. Even events that aren’t technically streamed live—such as HBO’s Game of Thrones — can stumble if a lot of people try to access it at the same time.

Live streaming is hard. Unlike Periscoping, producers can’t just set up a camera and flip the “broadcast” switch. The video needs to be encoded, then it needs to go the servers, where it’s then transcoded into multiple formats for a variety of screens and platforms. It then needs to be available automatically to anyone requesting it. If any one of those transcoding operations fails, a portion of your audience gets the spinning wheel.

But by this point, broadcasters should be aware of the challenge. Yes, it’s hard, and yes, it’s incredibly hard to test server load until the event is actually happening, but broadcasters and producers should know this by now. Not only does it seem like CNN overestimated how prepared they were, they even got a little cocky with it: besides offering the debate through CNNgo, they offered a free live stream on their website and a live stream in virtual reality.

After listening to the opening remarks on the radio, I gave CNNgo’s iPad app one last go. Remarkably, it worked, and I managed to AirPlay it from my iPad to the Apple TV without problem until the final block, when the iPad app mysteriously stopped loading the stream. I quickly switched to the native Apple TV app — which, for whatever reason, worked.

The stream then stopped in the middle of Bernie Sanders’ final speech. In that moment, I felt a lot like Sanders: a grumpy old man tired of watching history repeating itself.