The Iphone livecast was a failure
I tried to watch the Apple launch with my Purdue Polytech students to show them how to introduce a product with a livcast… What we got out of the experience was how not to sell a product with an online livecast. First off, Apple was too cheap to version the release with a second stream dubbed in Chinese. It chose to bring down the sound level of the English track, making it hard to hear, and it inserted a Chinese commentary in sotto voce, which made the English track nearly impossible to understand. I also think that the Chinese listeners had trouble hearing the commentary in their native language as well. More important, it was impossible to watch the livecast without major interruptions at Purdue on a 100 MB ethernet network… The stream would quit on us without warning or enter a state of endless buggering. Plus, the livecast could not be watched on non Mac computers… Our conclusion? This was an event for the people in the convention center, the rest of the benighted world be damned… Who needs customers when you have the top tech blogs eating from the palm of your hand if you give them a launch pass and goodie bag at the end?
