“Apple’s live stream of the unveiling of the iPhone 6 and Watch was a disaster today right from the start, with many users like myself having problems trying to watch the event,” Dan Rayburn writes for Streaming Media Blog. “While at first I assumed it must be a capacity issue pertaining to Akamai, a deeper look at the code on Apple’s page and some other elements from the event shows that decisions made by Apple pertaining to their website, and problems with how they setup storage on Amazon’s S3 service, contributed the biggest problems to the event.”
“Unlike the last live stream Apple did, this time around Apple decided to add some JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) code to the apple.com page which added an interactive element on the bottom showing tweets about the event,” Rayburn writes. “As a result, this was causing the page to make refresh calls every few milliseconds. By Apple making the decision to add the JSON code, it made the apple.com website un-cachable. By contrast, Apple usually has Akamai caching the page for their live events but this time around there would have been no way for Akamai to have done that, which causes a huge impact on the performance when it comes to loading the page and the stream.”
“As for the foreign language translation that we heard for the first 27 minutes of the event, that’s all on Apple as they do the encoding themselves for their events, from the location [where] the event is [held]. Clearly someone on Apple’s side didn’t have the encoder setup right and their primary and backup streams were also way out of sync. So whatever Apple sent to Akamai’s CDN is what got delivered and in this case, the video was overlaid with a foreign language track,” Rayburn writes. “The bottom line with this event is that the encoding, translation, JavaScript code, the video player, the call to S3 single storage location and the millisecond refreshes all didn’t work properly together and was the root cause of Apple’s failed attempt to make the live stream work without any problems. So while it would be easy to say it was a CDN capacity issue, which was my initial thought considering how many events are taking place today and this week, it does not appear that a lack of capacity played any part in the event not working properly. Apple simply didn’t provision and plan for the event properly.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote earlier today:
The inept hack responsible for Apple’s livestream yesterday should have already received his pink slip by now, if Apple is still operating properly.
As Steve Jobs would likely say, “Can somebody tell me what a live stream is supposed to do? Then why the —- didn’t it do it?”
Obviously, not all Apple employees are sparkling gems.
Frankly, there were more disappointments than technical problems with the streaming. The fact that the entire auditorium was filled with predominantly Apple employees means that the crowd reactions are no indication of the actual public reaction to the new product unveilings. Even then, the iPhone 6 didn’t show up with anything gamechanging except Apple Pay, which i predict will be a slower rollout than many people are expecting. It will be necessary to understand how the credit card information is secured on the phone before one can trust it. You know there’s someone planning to crack it already.
The Apple Watch unveiling was met with a standing ovation, but it is hard to see why — Apple didn’t really show anything but the external styling, a rather uninspiring home screen of hard-to-see icons, and the oversized crown that essentially brings Apple right back to the clickwheel days. We would have been more interested to see more about the supposed “mile long list” of things the Apple Watch is supposed to do instead of watching a stupid iOS game. What was revealed just doesn’t seem essential — and that’s coming from someone who actually took the time to view the keynote hours after the event when one could actually view it. It is embarrassing that Apple couldn’t do a better job on an event of this magnitude.
Mike – to have missed the essence of Apple. Good day to you sir.