Report card: Apple's video stream (updated)
For the first time in a long time Apple yesterday streamed live video from its iPod announcement in San Francisco. Apple announced a new raft of iPods, a second-generation Apple TV and demo'd iOS 4.1 and 4.2 but an interesting rumor surfaced about the video stream itself.
The rumor was that Apple decided to stream the event to test its new new data center in Maiden, North Carolina. The $1 billion data center is one of the largest ever built.
Update: Dan Rayburn confirms that Akamai provided the video stream of yesterday's event -- not Apple. (Tip: @WildCowboy)
The video stream worked fine for me in Safari on my i7 MacBook Pro with decent performance and minimal artifacting and lag, but when I switched to my iPhone 4 (running on AT&T 3G, outside Philadelphia) things went immediately down hill. While I was able to watch video for about 1-2 minutes, the connection was choppy and the video would slip out of sync. Then the video dropped completely and I received this message (below)
"Due to your current limited bandwidth connection this stream is audio only."
But even the audio-only stream frequently dropped and I had long gaps of silence punctuated by occassional blips of random audio. It picked up again when Coldplay's Chris Martin was into his second song close to the end of the event.
- On the Mac I give Apple's video stream a B+
- On the iPhone I give it a D-
What about you? How would you grade Apple's video stream?