Macworld Keynote--A Note on QuickTime Streaming

1999–2004July 20, 2000Macs Only!Events
We saw the keynote via a satellite link and a wall-sized TV at the Apple Market Center in Reston, VA, because a conflict prevented us from getting to New York Tuesday night. The alternative would have been to watch it webcast via QuickTime streaming on one of our Macs connected to RoadRunner cable internet. As noted yesterday, the color rendition on the Apple Market Center's projection TV was not particularly good but there were no other problems with the broadcast. On the other hand, we've had problems with QuickTime streaming webcasts in the past when there has been a huge demand. I don't know how many people watched the keynote webcast by QuickTime steaming but it must have been a lot and taxed the system pretty hard. Neal Emerald is also located in Northern Virginia and here is his webcast experience:

"I viewed Steve's keynote from my office at George Mason University. I watched on a Power Macintosh G4/450, with 256 megs of RAM, Mac OS 9.0.4 (including all of Apple's software updates), QuickTime 4.1.2 and both Netscape Communicator 4.73 (128 bit encrypted version) and Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 (128 bit encrypted version).

"To be safe, prior to the keynote, I increased the RAM allocation to QuickTime, Communicator, and IE to 3 times their normal allocation, and I used the Mac OS 9.0.4 base extension set to eliminate any third party software conflicts that might occur and interfere with viewing the keynote. My computer is connected via its ethernet port to a 10BaseT ethernet network. We have a T3 connection to the internet. I chose the "T1 or greater" option for viewing the keynote.

"From the very start, the Quicktime stream was very choppy and pixelated. At times the video stream would halt entirely while the audio continued. Other times, both audio and video would halt, then resume 20 seconds later.

"I had to restart my computer 5 times during the keynote as QuickTime quit once with no error message, the other 4 times, QuickTime just locked up. I tried this in both Netscape Communicator and IE with similar results.

"An an experiment, I also started up my PC sitting next to the Power Mac G4. This computer is a Micron Millennia, Pentium II/450, 128 megs of RAM, Windows 98 SE, 10BaseT ethernet connection, with QuickTime 4.1.2, Netscape Communicator 4.73 (128 bit encrypted version) and Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5. Viewing the QuickTime stream on the PC produced an even poorer quality of video.

"Theoretically, I have an extremely powerful and capable system, including my pipeline to the internet. I am not saying the problem was caused by something Apple did, the problem could have been caused by a bottleneck anywhere in the system. This all points to how far we have yet to go before the internet truly becomes a communications infrastructure that can support streaming video and other bandwidth intensive applications.

"Finally, I think Apple should at least take a look at this keynote and see if adding additional streaming servers would help alleviate the problem for when they conduct future QuickTime video streaming presentations."

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