Apple Blasted For iPhone Launch Stream Meltdown

Apple may be getting raves from Apple fanatics for its eagerly awaited iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, Apple watch and a new Apple Pay mobile payment system. But the company is getting a black eye for its streaming online press conference Tuesday, which dropped time and time again for those viewers anxious to get a first look at the new Apple products.

"This eats at their brand," said Dave Tidler, a digital communications solutions architect for Yorktel, an Eatontown, N.J.-based cloud, unified communications and collaboration video MSP that does 3,000 webcasts a year for customers with 99.99 percent uptime. "This definitely took a bite out of the Apple. It doesn’t seem like they did a lot of testing to anticipate the load on the network or the load from the origination point of broadcast. If things like this continue to happen, they will lose market share."

Apple did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

[Related: It's Here: New iPhone 6, 6 Plus And Apple Pay System]

Meanwhile, Tidler, who recently authored a white paper titled "Three Best Practices For Video Conferencing, Streaming Media and Webcasts," said the streaming failure is surprising given that Apple is competing in consumer markets with tough competitors such as Samsung in smartphones and Adobe in live streaming, said Tidler.

Yorktel would have recommended extensive preload testing and made sure that all devices would have been able to view the Apple stream, said Tidler.

Apple only allowed Apple devices to stream the live event.

Apple was ridiculed for the live streaming meltdown on Twitter where a new hashtag, #ThingsBetterThanAppleLive, where users competed for humorous and distasteful things better than Apple Live including: "watching paint dry" and "the six o’clock news."

watching paint dry

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Tidler, for his part, said Apple should take full responsibility and apologize for the streaming meltdown. "Apple needs to take responsibility for the entire event from pre-event testing and user engagement to post-event follow-up. They need to complete that process. It is a whole life cycle."

Tidler said it is impossible to know the exact cause of Apple’s streaming meltdown given that he does not have the technical details of the broadcast stream. He said he would like to know if Apple used a streaming content service provider for the broadcast.

If Apple did the streaming from its own servers, the company clearly was not aware of the "pitfalls" that come with streaming a webcast as eagerly anticipated as the Apple iPhone launch event, said Tidler.

PUBLISHED SEPT. 9, 2014