Apple has been guilty of a handful of major blunders over the years, but Tuesday’s may be one of the most prominent. It seems a bit strange that a company which prides itself on technological innovation couldn’t get something so basic to work right.
Apple watchers blocked
For about the first 30 minutes of Apple’s presentation on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, those who wanted to watch the live stream couldn’t even see it. They were greeted by a simple slate identifying the event. Then when Apple finally did get it up and running, viewers heard the Chinese translator overtop the actual audio in English.
Cult of Mac reports that problems with JavaScript brought the whole live stream down. That’s according to expert Dan Rayburn from Streaming Media.
Apple tries to do too much
According to Rayburn, Apple added some JavaScript Object Notation to its home page. That added the live blog or tweets that were still accessible during the event. The page updated over and over in just a fraction of a second, but he said the result was cache problems. This created a massive problem with loading the live stream to the page and making it viewable to visitors.
Apple Inc. NASDAQ:AAPL reportedly only worked with Akamai’s content delivery network on the video stream. However, the servers were unable to cache the page because of that JavaScript code. And the page’s performance issues had a major negative impact on the video because the company embedded it right onto the page.
Apple had problems with the encoder too
When it comes to the Chinese translator being heard over the English audio, Cult of Mac said an Apple employee probably caused the problem by not setting the encoder up correctly. Also the primary stream was out of sync with the backup stream, which is probably why the preshow songs were doubled up before the event started.
Rayburn thinks Apple rebooted the encoders after the show started, resulting in “could not load movie” and “you don’t have permission to access” errors for iOS and Apple TV users who were trying to watch the event.
