Apple always live streams its iPhone events on its own Events website and the Events app on the Apple TV, but this year, for the first time, Apple also did a YouTube live stream.

Within just 10 minutes of when the event kicked off, Apple had over 500,000 viewers, and at the live stream's peak, when new iPhones were being shown off, Apple reached 1.875 million viewers.

appleyoutubelivestream

After this screenshot was taken, views climbed even higher

We've never before known how many people watch Apple's live streams because the company doesn't share that information, but the YouTube metric gives us some idea of how popular it was. For comparison, it earned more views than YouTube live streams from other companies like Samsung and Google.

The biggest YouTube live stream saw 8 million people tuning in when Felix Baumgartner jumped from a space capsule at 120,000 feet and parachuted back to the earth's surface, while SpaceX's Falcon Heavy launch in September 2018 garnered 2.3 million views.

The 1.875 million viewer metric does not include those who watched the live stream on the ‌Apple TV‌ through the Events app or through the Events website, which means actual live viewership was likely a good deal higher.


Apple's live stream is no longer available on YouTube at the current time, but the full event video has been uploaded.

Tag: September 2019 event

Top Rated Comments

Cold_Beaver Avatar
Cold_Beaver
27 months ago
How many stayed awake?
Score: 25 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Aldaris Avatar
Aldaris
27 months ago
How many stayed awake?
I’m beginning to just use the MacRumors live updating post. Go ahead and check it every 5-10 minutes... certainly not worth the 90 minutes... seriously.

In all seriousness I think the keynote formula is played enough. Apple needs to innovate in that arena or just go ahead with press releases and videos online. Seriously the “we even made a video” you just spent 10 minutes talking about it, now we need a 5 minute video recap?! Seriously?!

I don’t know about the rest of you but doing these the way Apple has for the last decade is exhausting... so many other tech companies have copied it/attempted to and it’s just blah at this point.
Score: 14 Votes (Like | Disagree)
ThunderSkunk Avatar
ThunderSkunk
27 months ago
I don’t know about the rest of you but doing these the way Apple has for the last decade is exhausting... so many other tech companies have copied it/attempted to and it’s just blah at this point.
I dozed off three times watching this one and had to rewind. The last time, I didn’t even bother. This entire keynote could have been about a 15 minute affair without all the padding.

If Apple were me showing up to fourth grade, they’d be told they’re a little light on lunch money and would spend all recess hiding from the resulting punch in the stomach.
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)
GubbyMan Avatar
GubbyMan
27 months ago
The quality of the live stream on Apple's website was so much better than YouTube's 1080p stream. YouTube had horrible compression artifacts whenever there was a dark background.
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
DakotaGuy Avatar
DakotaGuy
27 months ago
I couldn't watch it live because I was busy at work trying to make money to buy this stuff.
Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)
rjohnstone Avatar
rjohnstone
27 months ago
The stream from Apple was horrible. Audio kept going out of sync or dropped out all together.
Didn’t see anything worth upgrading my Xs for.
Why they kept the Series 3 watches around, yet dropped the Series 4 is beyond me.
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)
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