Hacker News Reader

Comment by sami36 | Hacker News Reader

without delving in the conspiratorial, Can anyone explain why would the broadcast be restricted to Apple TVs other than trying to control the number of concurrent streams they have to serve for scaling purposes ?

View on HN

It isn't restricted to Apple TVs, it's restricted to anything that runs iOS >=4.2 or OS X >= 10.6.

While I understand Apple TV is a product, and you're explaining that the service is available outside that particular product...

"anything that runs iOS >=4.2 and OS X >= 10.6" that is going to display a live video feed from another city is acting as a TV by Apple. Or, an Apple TV. In a colloquial sense, yes, this is indeed restricted to Apple TVs.

Pretending that someone might refer to my iPhone or my Mac Pro as an "Apple TV" is twisting things rather fiercely.

Yours? Certainly not. But I bet that thousands of less tech savvy people do refer to their devices as TVs, especially in the context of live video streaming.

Do those people frequently post comments to Hacker News?

Good lord, they might read it. I don't know. I was just trying to mention that Apple devices act like TVs to the regular population. That's all. I don't care if they read these comments, I care that HN users are not so constantly hiding in their bubble. It's clear to me now (via all the downvotes) that these comments are not welcome here - I'll stop. Sorry.

You came into a conversation where somebody had clearly just misread the page and didn't notice where it supported more hardware, and injected this bizarre guessing game of how hypothetical "regular" people could potentially use the phrase "Apple TV" to refer to any Apple hardware with a screen, and you're wondering why you're getting downvoted?

> and you're wondering why you're getting downvoted?

No, I'm not wondering that at all (where'd you get that idea?). I said very clearly that I understood, and was willing to stop the discussion as it's obviously unwelcome. Why keep hammering me on this?

Bizarre guessing game? I was making a single observation about terminology. Nevermind.

I think you meant to put an "or" instead of "and"

it's restricted to anything that runs iOS >=4.2 OR OSX >= 10.6

Yes, of course. Thank you, fixed.

VLC can play the stream too. You just need the URL ending in m3u8 which can be found here: http://a1.mzstatic.com/us/r1000/000/Features/oct_2012_event/...

In VLC, is it a simple network stream? Or RTP? UDP?

Here's the URL, by the way http://qthttp.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1210pibasdfvoihbadsv/a...

Media->Open Network Stream... works for me, but click the playlist repeat button to deal with occasional connection loss.

My guess is that they aren't artificially limiting it, they are using HLS[1] which is only supported by certain browsers/devices. Stream isn't up yet to test but it should work on a newer (4.0+) Droid as well as in VLC if you can find the stream url.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming

Reply on news.ycombinator.com