Bad JavaScript To Blame For Apple’s Live Streaming Snafu

We know that many of you guys tried to tune into Apple’s live event yesterday morning, and while it might have worked out for some of you guys, based on the feedback and complaints we’ve come across Twitter, chances are many of you guys got interrupted broadcasts which the image above, or your video was drowned out by the Chinese translator in the background.

So what gives? Well according to a post from Streaming Media (via Cult of Mac), it turns out that bad JavaScript was to blame for Apple’s little snafu with the live stream. Now prior to this Apple’s live streams have been relatively smooth, depending on your connection, but we’re many would agree that yesterday was just horrible.

Streaming Media found that this is thanks to a JSON code that was added to Apple’s website that enabled the live tweets to appear on the page. This made the page refresh every few milliseconds and it also made it un-cachable which impacted the performance when it came to loading the website and trying to watch the stream.

The code also made the player drop the quality of the stream, which some of you guys might have noticed, because it thought there were more requests to watch the stream than there really was. As for the Chinese translator in the background, it seems that the problem could be on Apple’s end as they did not setup the encoder properly, thus the streams were out of sync.

Well hopefully Apple has learnt from this little mishap and that future Apple live streams will be smooth and problem free. In the meantime hopefully it did not manage to take away from the excitement of Apple’s new products – the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, and the Apple Watch.

[Image credit – Chris Roman]

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple