Apple and Akamai Deliver Landmark Webcast of Macworld Keynote

1999–2004July 25, 2000Macs Only!Learning
according to this Apple press release. "Apple and Akamai announced that the webcast of the Macworld Expo keynote delivered by Steve Jobs last week set new Internet records for the delivery of content at broadband rates. More than 6 terabytes of content were served during the one and a half hour webcast, which attracted more than 95,000 unique web visitors. During the peak of the webcast, more than 4.3 gigabits per second of video were streamed at broadband rates to more than 21,000 simultaneous viewers, including 5,000 visitors who watched 1 megabit-per-second (Mbps) streams." We posted Neal Emerald's poor reception and received a number of emails on both sides. Here's a counterpoint good experience from Per Wising in Sweden:

"Apart from being a frequent visitor on the Macs Only! site, I've followed your coverage of the MWNY keynote that was held yesterday.

"Your reader report on the MWNY webcast experience surprised me a bit. It may be due to the fact that Akamai distributes the stream, but where I am located at home in Stockholm, Sweden, the stream appeared unusually good. I used my G4/350 w/ 128 MB RAM and MacOS 9.0.4 and a fairly slow cable modem (512 kb/s that *never* peaks downstream). It worked without severe distortion or significant lags. The sound was great.

"I had two streams going at the same time; one through the QT Player (QTTV) and one embedded stream in IE5 (from ZDNET, which was really from Apple's servers). I did lose the sound during Steve's iMovie 2 presentation, but that appeared not to have anything to do with the stream."

...and Eugene Chan:

"After reading the report from Neal Emerald regarding his disappointment with the QT stream, my experience was different, yet I am physically on the other side of the country. I stayed overnight in my lab to watch the stream on the UC Berkeley campus network on good hardware. By good hardware, I mean a Gateway GHz Athlon with 384 MB of RAM.

"Once the stream started, I found the video and audio to be crisp and clear, sustaining a 950 kbps stream on the "T1 or greater" stream. The stream died once at first...I got worried. Luckily, after one reload, the stream sustained itself throughout the keynote, up until the iMovie 2 demo, where the audio signal was dropped whenever Steve Jobs played an iMovie clip. This was experienced, I suspect, by nearly everyone watching the stream. Things went a little downhill from there. The T1 stream died on me, and I was forced to watch the lower bandwidth offering, which started out a little bit choppy, but smoothed out in about 5 minutes. Everything was fine from there."

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