How to watch Apple’s iPhone 6 event live stream on Windows and Android
Later today, Apple will unveil the iPhone 6 at a special event in Cupertino, California. Somewhat unusually for Apple, it will be broadcasting a live video stream of the event — but, for reasons we still can’t fathom, Apple restricts the official feed to people watching on an iOS or OS X device. Fortunately, if you’re a Windows (or Android) user, we have a couple of solutions for watching live video of Apple’s event.
11:47am: This post has been updated with (probably) the correct stream URL, but we will confirm that it works when the stream actually goes online.
VLC
The one true video player, VLC, has a lot of features that you probably don’t know about — including the ability to open network streams, which is exactly how Apple is broadcasting the event (but only to people using Safari). A network stream is basically a real-time feed (video or audio) that’s being broadcast onto the internet — and if you have the right tool, you can tap into it.
If you don’t already have VLC for Windows, download it. (These instructions will also work for VLC for Android, but obviously the interface will look very different.)
Click Media > Open Network Stream. You will see a dialog that looks like this:
Copy and paste this URL into the network URL field: http://devimages.apple.com/iphone/samples/bipbop/gear1/prog_index.m3u8
If you’re using Firefox or Chrome, and you have VLC installed, you may also be able to just paste the URL straight into a browser tab. Your browser will recognize that it’s a network stream and load VLC as a plug-in.
If everything works as intended, you’ll hear an annoying bip-bop sound effect and some kind of TV test pattern:
Note: This is not the actual September 9 Apple event stream. We don’t yet know the URL for today’s event — but hopefully we’ll find out before the event and update this post.
Updated: It looks like this will be the correct URL for today’s event: http://p.events-delivery.apple.com.edgesuite.net/14pijnadfpvkjnfvpijhabdfvpijbadfv09/m3u8/atv_mvp.m3u8— but until the feed actually begins, we can’t confirm.
Alternatively, use a re-stream
The other option — and perhaps the only option if we can’t uncover the network stream URL for the event — is to watch one of the many re-streams that will pop up on Ustream. These re-streams take the official feed and re-upload it so that non-Apple/Safari users can enjoy it. The Live Tech Keynotes channel on Ustream is one of the best places to watch re-streams of Apple events – and it looks like they’re already all systems go for today’s iPhone 6 event (embedded below).
In the past, one other method has worked: If you install Safari and Quicktime for Windows, the official event stream might work. Since Safari for Windows hasn’t been updated for over two years, though, this method may not work any more.
Finally, you can always tune into our own live blog of Apple’s iPhone event. (And don’t forget, if you go down the VLC route, you will need to come back here to get an updated network stream URL!)
Author: By Sebastian Anthony