Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
Kind of late for it, but happy new year to everyone nevertheless!
The most exciting media event so far, for some of us anyway, was of course yesterday's keynote speech from MacWorld. For the first time, I watched a live broadcast, unsure of what to expect. On one hand, can't expect much from streaming. On the other, this was Apple, they run large media sites, they're used to handling stuff like this. In any case, I got connected and started watching camera slides over the audience a few minutes before the set start time.
The video was relatively high quality and high resolution, but there clearly was too little data coming through the pipes much of the time. Sound remained fine through most of it, but as the event progressed good picture was almost the exception rather than the norm. When I got a total pause of both sound and video a time or two I gave in, closed the stream and tried to reconnect.
This time I got connected to a much lower quality stream, so it seemed rather obvious that Apple was trying to conserve its bandwidth. It didn't run too smoothly either, so I still had video problems, the odd stutter and of course much lower resolution and framerate even when things ran as fine as possible.
I even got disconnected a few times, with an "out of bandwidth" message even. Seems quite like overload on the server, right? So why did my friends get to watch the high quality stream all the way through, with fewer problems than I had even when it worked? Does my bandwidth matter much too? Did too many people on the same network as I watch at the same time? I don't know, but it'd be interesting to find out.
(Hurries off to school for the first time in weeks.)