If you tuned in for Apple’s majorly hyped live stream of its iPhone 6/Apple Watch event yesterday, you probably noticed a few hiccups along the way: music playing from the Flint Center while another song streamed over the video, a translator speaking over much of the presentation, and the video just plain failing several times along the way. Dan Rayburn at StreamingMediaBlog.com shares his insight of what caused Apple’s major announcement video stream to botch itself throughout the show. According to Rayburn, it’s surprisingly not due to the number of viewers:
Shortly before the event kicked off, many viewers were hit with the “TV Truck Schedule” image instead of Apple CEO Tim Cook welcoming the audience and jumping right into the new iPhone 6/iPhone 6 Plus news. Refreshing was either met with an ‘access denied’ page, a frozen stream, or the now famous truck schedule photo. For me, this was the behavior across three different screens, and others like the breakfast restaurant chain Denny’s Diner took note too.
[tweet https://twitter.com/DennysDiner/status/509396332843646977/]
Notably, Apple did accompany its live stream footage with a blog updated in real time with marketing information, product details, and tweets from celebrities and reporters, which helped fill in for the botched stream. At any rate, if the stream’s wonky behavior did come down to improper planning on the front end of the event with caching issues and S3 storage configuration, that hopefully means we won’t see a similar episode in the future.
