Dear Apple: Please free the keynote

Many moons ago, Apple keynote day meant huddling around the computer, and watching a live feed of the proceedings. What would happen!? What would Steve reveal!? How would the crowd react!? This was in the late 90's early 00's. Then in a strange technological step backwards, just as more people could watch the broadband presentation, and just as Apple's popularity began to soar, the live feeds disappeared. Now we're left with the clipped text of bloggers in attendance to fill us in, as to what's happening as the event unfolds.

Granted the surge in popularity also would mean increased bandwidth concerns if the event was live. At the same time, bandwidth costs have fallen dramatically, and continue to do so. Also, Apple has increased it's "rainy day" fund to over $20 billion. Granted there are plenty of ways people would suggest spending that money, but providing a live feed (especially when the event is already professionally taped for later download) would be a literal drop in the iPod bucket.

Apparently though, it's not the money that keeps Apple from providing the stream live. For WWDC, just as we did for MWSF, we asked Apple to allow us to stream the keynote live, with our humble little site footing the bandwidth bill, and taking the heat for any performance issues: All we asked was to tap into the feed from the production company. Those requests were, denied - a surprise to no one, including us.

The point isn't whether we ever stream these events, but rather that it only makes sense for Apple to make them freely available. Wouldn't be better for the first impressions of the keynote to be directly from Apple? (At least from Apple's standpoint) Wouldn't that be better than having the information passed on by bloggers who could err with specs/pricing, as well as add their own commentary/spin to the coverage?

We're not asking Apple to do something groundbreaking: we're asking them to return to a previous practice that was ahead of its time, and in the process, they will gain more control over the message taken from each keynote.

In the meantime, we'll continue to provide what we believe is the next best thing: Live video coverage before, during, and after the event. If Apple wants a tiny site to be the first with live video of new products via our correspondents at these events, that's perfectly fine for us. But for Apple fans in general, it's a shame we can no longer hear the latest and greatest straight from Steve's mouth.