Written by Liz Gannes
Posted Friday, August 7, 2009 at 1:07 PM PT

 

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.

iphoneunderworld

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.

Underworld – Born Slippy Nuxx

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Topic: Shows & Stars

Comments (8)

  • 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.

    DaveZatz — 1:31 PM on August 7, 2009 Reply

  • 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.)

    DaveZatz — 2:13 PM on August 7, 2009 Reply

  • 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

    nicefishfilms — 2:54 PM on August 7, 2009 Reply

  • 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…

    Bill — 4:06 AM on August 8, 2009 Reply

  • Finally, multimedia for what it was really intended for…

    Tan The Man — 12:12 PM on August 8, 2009 Reply

  • iPod Touch as well?

    Dan — 12:43 PM on August 8, 2009 Reply

  • I think this is a great idea. I wish I found this post sooner.

    Luis T. — 8:12 AM on August 9, 2009 Reply

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