waffle

It’s better than the old QuickTime streaming. It cut out surprisingly few times. But those are the kindest things I can say about it.

• Sometimes, the previous segment would repeat.
• Sometimes, it would shift up or down in quality and also skip back or forward. (Skipping back was worse because it pretty much guaranteed that you’d skip forward sometime soon and miss about twenty seconds.)
• Sometimes, the whole image would flicker about 1Hz. A few times this would cut out on its own after a sufficiently long wait, but you had to reload the page, and the video would inevitably sync up with the freshest stream playlist, which means that if you were behind, you would without mercy skip the delta.
• If you had a sufficiently low quality stream, you couldn’t go into full screen. You could go into full screen on a good quality stream, drop to low quality, exit full screen to check on something and then be unable to go into full screen until you caught a good quality headwind again.

So it is better, and I hope they continue doing it, but it’s not good. The errors pretty much all seem endemic to the technology and could hardly be fixed as such by providing more, faster and better servers, but if they did that and it held up, most errors wouldn’t be triggered to begin with.

It’s possible that at Apple’s scale, nothing works acceptably. But they made a bet on using what they had including the server farm side of the equation, and they’re going to have to live with the consequences.