The Apple Live Stream (on Sep 1): What Does This Mean? | Hacker News Reader

The Apple Live Stream (on Sep 1): What Does This Mean?

techcrunch.com

7 pointssamratjp8 comments

It means that Jobs would like to avoid the fiasco he faced last time when every journalist in the room was attempting to live stream the broadcast via WIFI.

This article makes some heavy, unsubstantiated assumptions based on little to no evidence. Purely a guess.

this has been tossed around, but the issue has not been journalists broadcasting over WiFi. Apple never provides WiFi. The issue was so many Myfi which clogged up the signals in the room. Whether Apple streams the video or not, there will still be the same number of Myfi's in the room.

Apple provided WiFi for FREE to ANYONE at the keynote speech announcing iPhone 4 in June. It worked great until the keynote. The MiFis fucked it up.

> It means that Jobs would like to avoid the fiasco he faced last time when every journalist in the room was attempting to live stream the broadcast via WIFI.

Or it's just that they believe to have found a way to stream to half the interwebs in real time. A few years ago Apple used to have life QuickTime feeds of their conference after all.

I think TechCrunch is right - the live streaming is going to be used to demonstrate the new, shiny streaming distribution network that Apple has been building - have a look at the announcement from Apple:

"Apple® will broadcast its September 1 event online using Apple’s industry-leading HTTP Live Streaming, which is based on open standards. Viewing requires either a Mac® running Safari® on Mac OS® X version 10.6 Snow Leopard®, an iPhone® or iPod touch® running iOS 3.0 or higher, or an iPad™. The live broadcast will begin at 10:00 a.m. PDT on September 1, 2010 at www.apple.com."

If we are to judge by those system requirements, this is not just h264 streaming on html5 (no chrome, and not even Safari on Windows)- it's going to be hooking into some proprietary Apple voodoo magic to make it work, exactly as a reasonable observer would expect if and when Apple starts streaming content to iDevices.

> If we are to judge by those system requirements, this is not just h264 streaming on html5

Is HTML5's <video> even able to handle live streaming?

I have a pretty good feeling this is about being able to directly communicate with consumers.

If the rumors about the iTV are true, I can imagine that there are pretty good odds that it's either going to turn the TV content community very much pro Apple or very much against Apple.

Apple is all about controlling its brand at whatever the cost. This is another move to secure its position should proponents not look fondly upon Apple as it moves into all channels of media and communication.

How about we wait til tomorrow?

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