A theory as to why Apple's live video stream was a complete bust
Apple's media event offered no shortage of exciting announcements, but folks hoping to catch the product unveilings live as they happened via Apple's very own livestream were left sorely disappointed.
To be blunt, Apple's effort to livestream yesterday's event was a complete bust from every angle. The feed would consistently go in and out, and many people struggled to get it up and running in the first place. Even users who were able to get a solid video stream were greeted with an odd audio overlay of a woman speaking Mandarin.
So what the hell happened? How did Apple, which did quite a bit to hype up this event, manage to completely botch what would have otherwise been an exciting way to take in all of the festivities?
According to a theory posited by Dan Rayburn over at Streaming Media, the problem wasn't a capacity issue, but was rather the result of some JavaScript code Apple added to the liveblog webpage to add a bit of Twitter integration 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. 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. And since Apple embeds their video directly in the web page, any performance problems in the page also impacts the video.
Rayburn's entire explanation is in-depth and well worth a read if you're interested in the technical nuts and bolts behind the failed livestream.
via The Loop
Update: Rayburn's explanation isn't presented as authoritative but rather as a speculative take as to the technical difficulties Apple experienced yesterday. At this point, the cause for the blunder has not yet been definitively pinpointed.
