Apple's poor iPhone 6-Apple Watch live stream event may not have been a capacity issue

September 11, 2014

People who tried to check out Apple's live stream of its iPhone 6-Apple Watch press event on Tuesday were met with images such as the one above, along with other issues, but the problems may not have been based purely on a lack of Internet capacity, according to one analyst.

According to StreamingMediaBlog's Dan Rayburn, several separate issues cropped up that caused Apple's live stream to be broken for much of the event. One problem was due to some special code Apple put into the live stream's website at Apple.com. Rayburn states:

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.

Rayburn goes into quite a bit of technical detail about what might have happened to the Apple live stream in his blog entry. What was your experience like in checking out the live stream?

Update: After Rayburn's blog post went live, a number of web developers and JSON experts have since disputed some of his claims. His blog also doesn't mention why the live steam didn't perform well on Apple TV set-top boxes. As with these kinds of opinions, they should be taken with a grain of salt.

Source: StreamingMediaBlog.com