Apple to Stream First Live Concert to the iPhone Tonight
Tonight Apple will produce its first-ever live event streamed to the iPhone: a concert by the electronica band Underworld. Apple has apparently kept the event quiet as it doesn’t want to overwhelm the AT&T network, but if you have an iPhone you can queue it up yourself at iphone.akamai.com or underworldlive.com. The show starts at 9 p.m. PT and the stream is free.
Apple in June released its own HTTP streaming protocol which uses adaptive bitrates to deliver a continuous smooth stream in varying network conditions. You can read more about how it works here and watch our demo video here. The intent of the technology is to optimize for difficult environments — like when a lot of people want to watch something at the same time, as in a live event, or when a watcher’s bandwidth cuts out, which often happens on a mobile phone. So tonight’s show should be a good test.
Underworld’s Karl Hyde and Rick Smith profess to be huge Apple fans and recently released their entire catalog on iTunes. Apple is using partners at Inlet Technologies and Akamai to power tonight’s show.
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No idea my iPhone natively supported live video. I need to read you guys more often! ;) Nothing useful at underworldlive.com now but the akamai site has several live video feeds. I have some NASA channel on now over WiFi (via Sprint MiFi). Cool.
Not sure how good a test this will be, though. The word hasn’t gotten out and I’ve never heard of Underworld.
@ Dave – You can watch the NASA channel over 3G too — it looks pretty hot. Check out the video demo I did. http://newteevee.com/2009/06/30/video-see-apples-http-adaptive-video-streaming-in-action/
AT&T’s going to seriously need to improve their coverage for me to stream video over 3G on a regular basis. Heck, I can’t even make calls most of the day. I reported my location about a month back but haven’t seen any improvement. (Which is why I pay for Sprint to keep my AT&T phone mostly operational over WiFi.)
This is the first concert to be produced by Apple but not the first concert/ show to be streamed on the iPhone. Peter Hilmmelman’s Furious World was the first concert/ show to be broadcast live on the iPhone. We were the first concert to use the Ustream iPhone App. Looking forward to the production tonight though. – michael sean wright – director, nicefishfilms
Also, earlier this Summer people started (illicitly) streaming Phish concerts on uStream:
http://www.psfk.com/2009/06/phish-fan-live-streams-entire-concert-via-iphone.html
Probably after the Furious World debut (hadn’t heard about that), but for the Jones Beach show on June 2nd there were 3,500 viewers during the course of the first show. It’s continued along with their tour, with the numbers presumably increasing. The quality isn’t so great, in my opinion – I’ve never watched more than a few minutes.
But if there was an official stream, with the input source being much higher quality than an iPhone, then it starts to get much more intriguing…
Finally, multimedia for what it was really intended for…
iPod Touch as well?
I think this is a great idea. I wish I found this post sooner.
The live music streaming market is still really in the early days. I imagine the quality of streaming to mobile devices has a few years development still needed to get up to the highest possible quality.
As it stands the technology required to stream live music can be quite expensive, if you re looking for the highest possible quality. My website, JustJamIt, which is going to be launched in January 2011 allows musicians and bands to stream live gigs online using our own high-tech encoder (http://www.justjamit.com).
We hope to also latch on to the streaming to mobile device market as soon as possible. We have the infrastructure to do it, but our first focus is getting the highest quality stream to your home computer fully up to scratch. Hopefully see you all there, it’s a great community site with lots going on.