Today at 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern, Apple is holding an event at its Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, CA to announce its new video service, and perhaps other new services as well. (A news service and a game service are both the subject of rumors.)
You can watch a live stream of the event on this page on Apple's website. Normally, a page like that would start showing video about a minute or so before the event starts. But this time, Apple actually turned on the camera yesterday — or perhaps, more likely, prepared something to stream so that it looks like that is what is going on. When I checked it out last night, I just saw feeds from various cameras showing a dark, empty theater, such as these:
However, Joe Rossignol of MacRumors reports that Apple has done some fun things over the hours, including showing videos on the stage, a fake iMessage conversation, etc.
[UPDATE: Apple finally ended the pre-event live stream at 7am Pacific / 10am Eastern. One of the last things I noticed in the stream this morning was a CarPlay screen showing someone driving to the Steve Jobs theater, arriving around 6:40 Pacific.]
For many years now, Apple has typically avoiding entering an existing market unless it could be a dominant player. I'm fascinated to see the service that Apple proposes to bring to the streaming video market today, and it will be interesting to watch over the next few years how Apple does in this market.
