First no video, then constant mixing between the TV Truck schedule, a video of the crowd, a video of the presentation screen showing the apple logo, a message showing apple copyright.
Refreshed a few times, got 'access denied to server' page a few times. Then got video with Chinese translations talking over the presenter. Then it suddenly stopped, I pressed 'resume' to get the TV truck schedule again.
I dont normally agree with these kind of things but honestly this time they deserve it. If this event ( and iWatch ) is really that important ( for Apple ) then this is the biggest screw up ever. Thousands ( possibly millions ) of People waiting and hoping to share the moment together and watching it live and be disappointed.
You really don't? And you're trying to take some form of moral high ground over it?
The stream was a disaster and tarnishes the entire announcement, whose image is priceless to Apple. The jobs of the people responsible are in no way worth more to Apple than the damage done by said people.
I've tried the page from my iPad and my TV set which interestingly also has the user agent as Safari. The page makes both crash.
I've always believed that Google making their pages crash iPad's Safari can have benefits, but obviously the web developers who produced the Live page used only Safari on their big computers and never tested them enough on the iPads. That alone is really unacceptable execution.
The reasons the servers got under bigger pressure was obviously the wrong decision to have the video content page and the live picture and text updating resource and script hungry page as one and the same. The browsers of the viewers crashed, they attempted to view again, producing much more load to the servers than it would be if these unfortunate decisions (everything on the one page) haven't been made.
Independently, the stream was obviously botched at the source. It seems all parts of the world got the same Chinese translated pieces and the truck signals.
There were more smaller disasters there making one big.
Well, that's sort of how business works, isn't it? I mean, they didn't just pick a few random techs and say "make this happen", they have people whose very job is the technology involved in making this thing happen. If someone demonstrates they fundamentally can't do their job, do you keep them on the payroll or do you find someone else who can get the job done?
Anyone who screwed up like this in the world of broadcast television would certainly be fired. I am actually etremely impressed by the new products (in a way I didn't expect to be), but this webcast failure tarnishes the launch and will directly impact their bottom line in the short term.
It gives the press an unflattering story to run with besides "OMG new shiny", diluating Apple's carefully prepared marketing push. That's why it has impact beyond just Apple fans.
From the prep of this whole thing, with redirecting apple.com to apple.com/live, I felt it was intended to replicate Steve Jobs's reality distortion field. "If we are going this far out, it must be huge!"
Ironically it's showing very clearly that the field has discorporated.
Okay, I might have misread. From where I come from, when people watch something, say en Apple show, instead of working we say "some don't have work". That's what I misunderstood. I also assumed (wrongly ? I haven't checked) it was in California which meant it was morning already.
The parents say "don't" not "will not". Even though there are trouble I very much doubt people are fired on the spot, they're too busy fixing it. But sure, some might. Later, in the future.
Anyway, the comment was out of line an the downvotes deserves.
".. and we want to get rid of this .. " cut to apple logo " .so weve decided .. " apple logo * snippet of apple ad * ".. so there you have it!.. " -access denied-
MacRumors.com is intermittently going out. Jesus. You'd think after umpteenth Apple keynotes they'd have this sorted out. It's not like it's their first rodeo.
What I'm missing in this sub-thread is guesses as to what went wrong. The video quality of all past Apple events I've watched where border line perfect, and I've seen quite a lot of them! Any ideas?
That's exactly what I meant... Jobs would have made them stress test that system before the event so this does not happen. The most popular company in the world that creates the incredible hype for its events should have made sure the system worked unless they wanted some to feel left out thus igniting jealous resentment.
The majority of past Apple live-streams have had problems, though this one was perhaps one of the worst. It's less an issue of Jobs-era vs. post-Jobs-era, and more to do with Apple's culture of control being at odds with the complexities of network scalability. (They should really just outsource it to YouTube.)
The HTML summaries on apple.com were a nice touch, though, which softened the blow.
2 new iPhone models: iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.
iPhone 6 is 4.7", iPhone 6 Plus is 5.5".
Power button on right side.
A8 chip - 13% smaller chip, 25% faster CPU, 50% faster GPU, 50% more energy efficient than A7.
Battery a little better on the iPhone 6; iPhone 6 Plus has amazing battery life.
VoLTE (Voice over LTE) - make calls over LTE internet instead of using minutes.
Camera is still 8MP...
> VoLTE (Voice over LTE) - make calls over LTE internet instead of using minutes.
That's would have been a killer feature if it had occurred when smartphones were new enough that providers were selling plans with limited call minutes and unlimited data, but now that virtually every carrier has smartphone plans that are unlimited phone minutes/unlimited text and limited data with surcharges for data overages, who is looking to move from using voice minutes to using data?
who is looking to move from using voice minutes to using data?
The carriers. VoLTE is the way to do Voice+Data with a single connection saving power and finally unifying the GSM and CDMA worlds[1]. This could be the first iPhone that can be used in both AT&T/TMobile and Verizon/Sprint in LTE enabled areas. It could also allow mainstream use of Wifi for voice calls like Republic Wireless does[2]. Add something like Multipath TCP[3] and you could even do seamless switching between Wifi and LTE depending on availability/performance.
Also ironic as 4G (ala LTE) standard has VOIP routing for calls you make unlike 3G which uses a separate voice channel.
So if you can not make a call upon LTE normally out of your call minutes then you won't be able to make a call over VoLTE as they call it as it will just route from your device to the telco provder in the same way as currently and maybe less QoS tagging, so be supprised if there was any situation were making a pure VOIP call will be better than using normal call minutes.
Now as many say all packages tend to have more than enough voice and SMS included quota and tend not to have unlimited data.
Now for WIFI based calls with no or poor signal then this would be useful, also for long distance calls, which will probably not be included in that huge minute call bundle.
So given all that for most it will be a novel feature they will not use, but for those making calls that do not fall within their calling plan, then this may be useful.
Of note I was aware of VOIP over wifi being a feature in some phones (Blackberry and Nokia) over 10 years ago; But alas the carriers back then blocked such features from coming to the market. Nowadays carriers have changed and that may be in part how Apple initially pushed there devices onto the market allowing more clout and the fact such features will be more standard is only a good thing. Albeit for most they will be a feature they will not use.
T-Mobile has been including WiFi calling with a ton of their Android phones for years. I'd be (pleasantly) surprised if any of the other US carriers actually use this on the iPhone 6.
Really depends on how carriers choose to meter usage -- without knowing anything else about VoLTE, my guess is that voice data won't count against your cap, similar to how data from $CableCo_Video_Streaming_Service doesn't count against your cap.
VoLTE is all-IP, but it is not an "OTT" technology. It's "carrier SIP for your phone number." At best, it could deliver higher voice quality between compatible endpoints. But it hasn't taken off because the advantages are mostly theoretical.
Being a carrier voice product, it probably will not have any advantages over other carrier voice products, e.g. international calls will still be the same price, etc.
Though if you're on TMobile, you get roaming calls for $.20 a minute - now this seems like a lot, but we just spent 2.5 weeks in France, and our total bill for both phones using the data/voice/message roaming was like $40 (all voice, data and messages were free). We made lots of calls - and the local ones were charged at the non-usurious rate above. I pay nothing monthly for this perk and I didn't have to swap sims or anything like that.
Our least expensive portion of the trip and historically the most frustrating (well aside from the autoroute tolls that don't accept US credit cards).
Yeah, it's not terrible, but $6 for a half-hour conversation every few days will drain your coffer pretty quickly. I would have loved to have Wi-Fi calling at the start of my latest trip. (Now I just use Google Hangouts with my old cell # transferred to Google Voice. Hooray for free Wi-Fi calling!)
I doubt VoLTE will make any practical difference in day-to-day usage, unless carriers allow customers to default to a custom SIP/IMS registrar -- which won't happen for a long time. Calls (signaling) are still routed through the carrier[1], and your carrier still has to interconnect with the other end. While most backbones have been all-IP for a long time, the copper/cellular last mile is still mostly circuit-switched, even more so internationally.
[1] I'd be very surprised if VoLTE traffic, including media, was sent over the public Internet at the same QoS as the rest of your data. Voice-over-LTE is a nice technical achievement -- IIRC reliability was very difficult to ensure, especially during 3G/2G handoff -- but to consumers, VoLTE means nothing.
I was. I refreshed and it got me the keynote, but with the audio for multiple languages at once (maybe the same root cause as the multiple songs on the TV truck screen), so I refreshed again. Now I'm back to the TV Truck schedule.
Is it just me or the iWatch "looks" really ugly, at least when compared with Moto 360 which looks beautiful.
iWatch may win out on functionality and user experience etc., but it just looks funky.
I was about to comment the exact same thing. Perhaps it looks better in person, but honestly I find it weirdly jarring and just wrong --I never thought I would feel such distaste for a millennial Apple device. It's a shame: if it looked like the Moto 360 (except with a fully-round screen), it would have been quite something...
But then de gustibus non est disputandum, so please don't flame me if you disagree!
(PD: Also it requires an iPhone to work at all?!?? Really?? That's just sad...)
Their patent portfolio is that ridiculous, so I wouldn't be surprised. I bet Motorola also holds the patent for "centering stuff" --hence the strangely off-centered everything.
The crazy part is the Gold 'Edition' Version. It's not like a Swiss watch, which is sold to be passed on to new generations, since your children won't be happy to get such outdated tech. What will they do with old Gold versions? Smelt them?
Maybe, actually. Return your old gold watch when you upgrade, and get some credit toward the new one. I think they already do this with other Apple devices.
It's about short term profits to cash in on the hype. I wouldn't be surprised several iterations of the Apple Watch down the line when they abandon the gold edition altogether once the novelty of the product decreases and stays constant.
iWatch may win out on functionality and user experience etc.,
but it just looks funky.
As Gruber pointed out, "Everyone else has gone skeuomorphic." I think he makes a terrible point since there are a severely limited set of possibilities for putting a small screen on your wrist and since existing watches have more than exhausted those possibilities.
I agree about the Moto-360: whatever its faults, it looks nice. I understand that the watch on my wrist right now is round because of the sweep of the dials, but it's also pleasant looking. What I find exciting about the Android side of the equation is that [in a couple of years] we'll probably have a crazy range of watches from which to select. Grab a Tag Heuer Android watch with replaceable innards or maybe a few cheap Fossils for variety.
Yeah — I usually agree with Gruber, but I think round is just a better shape for something that's meant to be worn. Jewelry is generally round as well.
I have seen it through a techcrunch tweet with capital "it's beautiful". When the picture of the iwatch showed up I was shocked. Never expected such an ugly design.
I agree. I think the appearance of the watch is more important than the UX. You might interact with it for 10 minutes out of a day, but it'll be on your wrist for the whole day. The utility of the watch has long passed from telling the time to being a fashion accessory.
Because it ultimately doesn’t matter. Those who really want to watch it already have some device that can play it and the rest doesn’t care about it anyway so much to watch a 2hr commercial and will just read about it somewhere or see it on TV later. I think it’s as simple as that. That’s why Apple doesn’t really try to make this work for as many people as possible.
They probably use https://developer.apple.com/streaming/ , an HTTP streaming mechanism that's implemented by Safari that didn't get adopted by any other browser.
Ever since Apple originated consumer computer video with Quicktime back in the early 1990s, they've done a great deal to make it better, first for CD Roms and in a proprietary fashion. But when the net came around they opened up their proprietary format to become a standard-- the Mpeg4 file format is the old MOV format. They've also proposed a lot of improvements along these lines for other people to adopt.
Like Bonjour, I really don't understand why other companies don't adopt these open standards. They don't benefit Apple particularly. It's not like Apple has some competitive advantage in HTTP Live Streaming. Meanwhile these competitors rush to copy everything else Apple does.
Frankly, I think its appalling that youtube, for instance, is still running on flash. How many years ago did they first trial MP4 streaming? Why I can't I access all the videos over MP4?
Why would you want your browser to be bad at streaming video?
None of those things are open standards. Both Mpeg4 and "Bonjour" require a licence to utilise. Maybe that answers your question, people don't want to pay Apple oodles of money?
> Frankly, I think its appalling that youtube, for instance, is still running on flash.
Everyone can turn on HTML5 for YouTube if they wish. They offer both. They give you the choice, the default is Flash (but Flash still has the widest support on older platforms).
> Why I can't I access all the videos over MP4?
Because people would have to pay licensing fees several times for the same stream (e.g. sender and receiver both have to pay $$$, sometimes the sender, browser vendor AND OS vendor have to pay $$$).
> Meanwhile these competitors rush to copy everything else Apple does.
And Apple copies everything their competitors do also. Just look at iOS 8, that was just copying some of the best features from their competition (not that I blame them, they were right to do so).
The new keyboard (Android), third party keyboards (Android), "Handoff" (everyone else), Spotlight web-search (everyone else), etc.
Apple hasn't done anything original since Jobs died.
> Ever since Apple originated consumer computer video with Quicktime back in the early 1990s
I think that honor befalls the ITU with their H.261. It's only a few years difference and it definitely was never as wide spread as Quicktime but that's the first format that I remember that actually worked. It never succeeded on the web though there were a couple of companies that tried to do this using so called browser plug-ins.
Live streaming is mostly the domain of RTMP these days, HTTP doesn't lend itself well to live (but works just fine for streaming stored content).
As for why browsers don't all do MP4, you could ask why browsers do not natively support RTMP, that would solve the whole problem in one go.
What, what? YouTube has been doing an HTML5 based web player for quite some time now[1], and I believe it supports FLV video as well, though I can't find a reference for that.
I have uninstalled Flash from my system. A great many videos on YouTube give me the "you need the latest flash player to watch this video" error.
Yes, several years ago, I was getting MP4 video, and today, a portion (say %30-%40) just launch with MP4. But most of the time I get the "you need flash".
It's really weird. Using the built-in HTML5 player, half the videos don't load. But those videos do exist — Google just doesn't want you to be able to access them easily. I can watch them on my iOS devices, I can download them using dirpy.com, and I can watch them in my browser using the YouTube5 plugin.
There are many protocols, including HTTP Live Streaming, RTSP, RTP, MMS, used by multiple browser plugins, such as QuickTime, Flash, Windows Media Player. A comprehensive list of such systems is on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_streaming_media_s...
Twitch uses HLS with a Flash front end. No idea about the others.
HLS is nice because it doesn't require any new servers or protocols -- it uses vanilla HTTP, and can be served up by basically any web server. As a result, it's much easier to make it work with a CDN.
I guess the reason of having such poor support outside Apple browsers, despite the benefits, has to do with licensing issues and the complications of embedding ads, as someone pointed out.
Yep, I noticed that the other day on their developers site. Couldn't watch a video on Swift because I'm not on OSX Safari! Something Microsoft would do 15 years ago.
Well, still, for a company that tries to make everything "simple and beautiful", why don't their video streams just work everywhere out of the box? That is the question.
What Apple's live streaming does, is in a CDN friendly way dynamically adjust the bandwidth going to a stream consumer. It's a great invention and there's no reason other people haven't adopted it. It's not being proprietary, it's simply being smart, because it's not trivial to do this kind of broadcast on the internet.
Here's the reality of video, and this goes for a lot of things that Apple makes "simple and beautiful". They fundamentally aren't. Video is a fundamentally difficult mess, a PITA, and the only way to have it work really smoothly is to have enough control over the entire stack to ensure that things work they way they are supposed to... and even then it doesn't always work. People adopting MP4 as a standard has gone a long way towards making things "just work" generally, but it's not sufficient by itself for a quality live stream.
I remember trying to watch a previous live stream from south america and the difficulties I had, even though I was using Apple devices and software the whole way.
Simple and Beautiful is a contradiction from "everywhere out of the box".
Those are two opposite goals.
This is an important thing to understand about software broadly, but with video it borders on impossible.
The thing is that any cable company in the US and Canada that streams content to their customers via the Internet is using adaptive bitrate streaming either using HTTP Live Streaming, MPEG DASH, HTTP Dynamic Streaming, or Microsoft Smooth Streaming.
It is far from impossible.
Everything is simple and beautiful if you are already embedded in the ecosystem/walled garden. If you are an outsider, it is another matter... Isn't it more or less the goal of every tech giant ?
Apple fans can justify anything - so don't expect anyone to say, yeah they are behind the curve on this.
The better answer is probably: "They simply don't care". No ifs and buts. Probably making it a bit exclusive and hard to get to only adheres to their marketing philosophy.
I'm getting older, so maybe my desires don't match up with the majority of tech people's anymore, but does anyone really want an iWatch (or whatever it ends up being called)? I am just not sold on the usefulness of such a thing.
Many moons ago I ran a research study for Microsoft on their SPOT watch initiative, and despite countless focus groups among many different consumer audiences, absolutely no one wanted a smart watch. Granted, their smart watch had some fairly large deficiencies due to the lack of mobile tech infrastructure available at the time.
I'm very intrigued to see if Apple can pull it off...
That's the weird thing about fashion, which is precisely what this is. If Apple can make this thing fashionable so that people want to show it off, it will take off.
It's incredibly hard to predict whether they will succeed or not (although after the fact most people will say what happened was incredibly obvious beforehand). They'll bomb or they'll take off.
I didn't see the point of the iPhone or the iPad before they announced them. I haven't worn a watch for 20 years... but if they do announce a watch (I expect it will be a wearable more than a watch) I bet I will buy it.
Because I don't think they'd make it if it weren't worth making. Apple has never tried to create a new category when they didn't have something substantial to offer.
Any newer entries? Post-iPhone, Apple (i.e., not Apple Computer) has been a very focused company.
There was an interesting presentation that Tim Cook gave where he said that every product Apple currently sold being was on a single table in front of him at the presentation - can't find the link now.
It's not just you. I don't get the whole smartwatch thing either. For $400 (or whatever it ends up costing), I can just pull my phone out of my pocket.
I think there's going to be some sort of breakthrough using it as an authentication device. Possibly using heart rate as biometric identification combined with a clever universal challenge-response mechanism (using audio, maybe). That's my prediction. :)
People do not want a watch like the current crop of i-watches. They hope that Apple will create a watch the masses want to buy.
That's what the excitement is all about, either pro-Apple people that want to see Apple creating another iPhone/iPad/iPod market, or anti-apple that want another Apple TV to finally prove that Apple could not recover from Steve Jobs death.
Best of all, unlike monads, this is a topic everybody can have an opinion about, that's weeks worth of traffic guaranteed. Apple announcement themselves are valuable product for the media.
I didn't get the point of a watch either, then I started surfing and needed to know when to stop to make it to work on time :)
There is a whole market of people that want apps for running, surfing, and other things that are nice to have in wearable form, but cumbersome to use in a phone form factor--assuming the phone is even waterproof.
I'd love for it to be able to be an input device for macbook & imac. Something like the Leap Motion but worn on the wrist and auto linking with the nearest device.
Personally, I'm not interested in an iWatch. I haven't looked at the specs, but I'm assuming the iphone connects to it. If it can notify meetings, texts, alerts, phone calls, etc. it might be really useful gadget for my wife when she is busy running behind kids around the house and at work.... bonus if it gave her an insight into how much energy she spent throughout the day, haha.
It's really ludicrous to be this picky about browsers when you're trying to reach new customers. I presume that Apple want to market to people who aren't Apple users already.
When a technology is implemented in a way that adheres to a certain standard of quality that leads to widespread adoption, to consumers it might as well be new technology.
Yeah, because Verifone's extant NFC readers definitely aren't standardized at all and haven't worked for years, with wide enough adoption that Whole Foods, Circle K, and fast food chains have them already. Everyone's just waiting for Apple to come along with the "standard of quality".
ApplePay seems to be doing things that others have basically done before, but doing it right in some important ways (credential on phone is for phone only, Apple doesn't get info on what you're buying), and I hope others follow suit.
Apple doesn't get info on what you're buying...
and I hope others follow suit.
As cynical marketing, I definitely see the value; in reality, not so much. Amazon, Visa, Petco, PayPal, BrianTree, etc. will still have a record of my purchases and we're on an inexorable march towards wider distribution of that data. How does Apple not having this data materially affect me?
Apple not having the data isn't dramatically more important than others not having the data, but having the data in fewer places is better for privacy (and the security thereof) and if "others follow suit" then they will start to not have that data. That said, Apple not having the data is more important than some players not having the data - there's more power in the consolidation of more kinds of data, and in a more complete picture of each kind of data, than in any individual datum in isolation - Apple touches large swathes of the lives of Apple users.
That's very disingenuous. Amazon, PayPal and Google rely on selling your data and selling you products based on your data to make money. Visa, Mastercard and Amex mostly rely on transaction processing fees, and make extra money on the data processing in a very limited way.
What Apple are doing is removing the middleman, purely making this about transactions, not data. This means they're avoiding selling private information as a revenue stream.
So not sharing your private information by default, is fundamental to your freedom. That's why we should all care, and why this is a great decision by Apple.
It's not that I don't care about this; it's that Apple is doing this cynically and for short term gain, not for substantial benefit. If they care about this as more than a marketing ploy, they would have set up an organization to set policies and to verify adherence. That would have been awesome.
"blah blah blah, and we don't store your financial information or transaction history. That's easy to say, but the pendulum has swung too far away from protecting our rights as consumers, so today we're doing more than that; we're announcing the Financial Information Security Organization and we're inviting companies to join us in making sure that all of our financial information is secure."
While I share your intentions, as a practical measure, I doubt Apple could have dictated those terms to their financial partners. Have you ever tried dictating terms to a bank?
De-facto useless organizations like your FISO example with not enough players on board to start with are just lip service. Essentially you're arguing that Apple should be doing the governments job...
I doubt Apple could have dictated those terms to their financial partners.
Have you ever tried dictating terms to a bank?
Why are we talking about banks? They have loads of partners besides banks/financial-partners...
De-facto useless organizations like your FISO example
Having been involved with or setting up [non-financial] organizations, I would hope not to make useless suggestions...
I'm suggesting something along the lines of BrainTree's data portability organization (http://www.portabilitystandard.org/). Apple should be able to get a raft of players on board for something along those lines. If not, my original point stands: Apple was making a useless gesture.
There's nothing left to "drive." NFC is here and has been here quite a while.
My camera supports NFC, my WiFi router supports NFC (useless though), my laptop has NFC, tons of payment providers do NFC, my LG washing machine has NFC (seriously), and on and on.
Apple is stupid late to the NFC party. NFC is here, and it is already super-popular. They cannot drive anything, they can just follow along.
They're no longer blocking Bitcoin wallets, and with the forthcoming APIs regarding payments and touch IDs, this could be a "third party opportunity": you pay with crypto, and the merchant receives dollars, with some arbitrary payment processor in between.
I'm not even sure what the strategical advantage of limiting the stream in the first place. People who can't access it still want information about Apple, and often resort to 3rd party blogs, or someone else streaming the stream. I understand why apple has a closed door stance on technology, but limiting people from participating in a live event about Apple seems foolish and with no obvious benefit
It's not Safari-only, it's just a Quicktime RTMP stream, like all their streams have always been. You should be able to watch it in any browser with a Quicktime plugin.
It uses Apple HTTP-LiveStream library which only Safari has support for (even though its opensource and unencumbered)... It has little to do with lock in
Correct me if I'm wrong. IIRC, there isn't a status code for temporary moved *with a timeout. If you use 307, it means the browser will always still check the original apple.com first, then get redirected to apple.com/live. Using 301 would make browser go to apple.com/live directly which improves response time. When the event is finished, they can do a 301 on apple.com/live back to apple.com to overwrite the rule.
Or lazy about their redirecting. 301's are supported by pretty much every browser, indexer and wget/curl whereas 302's sometimes fail on those. Its also pretty easy to reissue another 301 from /live to com/
I'm fairly certain they just want you to land on the live page, even if you can't view it in the current browser. It's about eyes on page to spur you to either stay tuned or move to a browser that works with it.
An alternative explanation to a very confident Apple is just that they changed their attitude about all this, thinking there is not really much of a difference between them providing a countdown or others doing it (before the last Keynote this countdown webpage got pretty huge), between them providing a liveblog or others doing it (there are always many liveblogs with often crappy photos, so why not shot beautiful photos and provide them directly?), unaware that would hype up the event.
I don’t think it’s that, but if they are sufficiently tone-deaf that could be the case. Apple historically hasn’t really been, definitely not when it comes to their events, but who knows …
I don't think the big deal is them providing live coverage, it's that their homepage is redirecting to the stream 24 hours before hand. Considering how many hits apple.com gets per day that's a big decision indicating a huge event.
Why a countdown? Probably because they're launching a watch. Wait and see. My guess is they hint at the why during the event, probably in the opening minute or so. They will also probably use time-based headlines in the slides.
I wonder how much outside the realms of possibility a VR headset could be...? They have patents and seem to have become more serious about 3D graphics lately. Maybe I'm just dreaming though. Maybe a wearable could be something to allow an iPhone/iPod type device to function as headset?
Lest anyone blame local networks or non-Apple hardware for the streaming problems:
I was on IRC with other iOS developers viewing the streaming using Safari on Apple hardware with fully updated software all around (I know these people), in different parts of the US, people working at different companies, using different, very fast, geographically diverse networks, and all of us were seeing the same catastrophic problems at the same times: a mix of simultaneous multiple audio streams sometimes in sync, sometimes slightly out of sync, stopping and starting video, truck schedules for 5-10 seconds every minute or so, English over Chinese, audio temporarily resetting to beginning of stream while another track of audio continued at the current position superimposed over the let's-start-over audio, access denied errors, pause/continue buttons not working, refresh not working.. this went on for at least 40 full minutes as the problems started before the broadcast and didn't stop until after 30 minutes. And no, we were NOT madly hitting Refresh or pause/restart all the time, although we did try invoking them a few times and calmly waiting, usually to little avail.
I want to emphasize that when I saw a TV truck schedule on my screen in San Francisco, at that very same moment my buddies in other parts of the country started seeing the TV truck schedule on their screens as well. If we can say one thing for this broadcast, it is that the screwups were very well synchronized for many if not all viewers.
The mind boggles as to why the didn't have someone dedicated to be listening to a dog food channel of their own stream on a remote network, and report the problems back earlier, and whether they did or not, why they couldn't fix it sooner.
Yes apple, I want to buy your products! Why? Well, because you showed such engineering prowess with your streaming service, that I am sure you know what you're doing!
Can anyone see this right now? My video is seriously messed up. I have both VLC and Safari running the stream. It's freezing, jumping around from the iPhone 6 release back to the beginning video. The audio is a combination of glitches, Chinese, and skipping english.
The new iMac 27" should have a nice 5120x2880 screen. That would sure justify the hype.
But I bet we'll just get a 4.7" iPhone, Apple catching up to where Samsung has been for three long years now with a medium sized phone instead of a tiny chiclet. (I love the chiclet, but bigger would be better.)
And we'll probably get another lousy "smart" watch that needs charging every day and doesn't do anything you can't do by pulling out your phone for a second. Maybe fanatic runners like Apple's CEO will find it almost as useful as a fuelband or fitbit.
Note: Downvoters really hate the idea of a retina iMac.
Refreshed a few times, got 'access denied to server' page a few times. Then got video with Chinese translations talking over the presenter. Then it suddenly stopped, I pressed 'resume' to get the TV truck schedule again.
On an iPad.