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Comment by gotrythis | Hacker News Reader

The fine print: "Live streaming video requires Safari 5.1.10 or later on OS X v10.6.8 or later; Safari on iOS 6.0 or later."

Really?

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The only two excuses for that are technical incompetence or purposefully insular attitude.

Edit: Downvotes are fine, but a counterargument would be more welcomed. There are dozens of live streaming services out there now that support every platform available, but Apple always insists on using their own. It backfires every year as the stream is flaky or has audio/video sync issues.

If they can't bring themselves to partner with someone else, they could at least devote the resources to fixing their own broken system.

If apple is looking to attract newcomers to their platform I think the last thing they should do is totally isolate them simply because they don't own an apple product already.

That's partly my point, but also the notoriously bad quality of the stream can't be doing much to boost the confidence of existing customers. Additionally, being in the middle of a workday, many current Apple users and fans may not have access to an Apple device right now.

It just seems like a lose/lose situation all around, but they stubbornly persist.

A big part of Apple's marketing strategy is to create an entire experience around their brand. If you don't have Apple products, you're on the "outside". This plays perfectly into that strategy.

Well in this case having an Apple device doesn't seem to help much.

There's a Safari for Windows though isn't there?

I don't know whether it is a counterargument, but does anybody know how many users want to watch this keynote, relative to other events?

The numbers I could find are 1.3 million viewers for this year's Super Bowl, 1.7 million for USA vs Germany in the FIFA World Cup, and 81.000 simultaneous viewers for the Macworld keynote, in 2002 (https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2002/01/09Apple-Delivers-Re...)

I think it is safe to bet that Apple's keynotes have a larger audience nowadays than in 2002, but how large is it? Reading http://www.scribblelive.com/press-release/record-breaking-on..., I do not rule out that it has more viewers than that Super Bowl stream, which, Google and my own experience tell me, wasn't perfect, either.

So, maybe, limiting this to Safari users is their best option.

Feel free to improve this speculative line of thought by providing data.

Not really[0], they just can't be arsed to officially support the rest. But it uses HLS[1] which no browser other than Safari and Android browsers support, so you have to use an external program (e.g. VLC)

[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/2yfqyj/watch_the_appl...

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

Perhaps interestingly, it was recently announced that Internet Explorer 12 will also supports HLS.

If you are wondering, like I just did, why it's supported on Android but not Chrome: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=54198#c1...

Yep. Every keynote.

Usually some people will post source links which should be streamable from non-mac machines.

If you're just a member of the public (even one who uses Apple products), Apple is going to tell you the important consumer-facing bits of this presentation with some TV commercials later.

The rest of the stuff in the keynotes—the stuff that makes them keynotes, rather than ads—only matters to Apple developers. And I'm not sure how you'd be an Apple developer without already being able to watch this. (Even if you only develop HTML5 webapps for iOS, that still means you've got an iOS test device.)

Someone always posts a link that can be opened in VLC on any platform.

Since they're not inclined to ensure all browsers can support it (the "walled garden" principle at work), makes sense to say what it does intentionally work on, and even take minor steps to ensure unsupported platforms don't work (so they don't get hit with "well, it sorta worked but sucked on Browser X!"

Not a super great argument for a $700bn company and when Safari has a < %5 browser market share. It's definitely intentional and definitely lame.

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