On the evening of June 5, the 2023 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference kicked off, the company's annual event where it also announces its new products. The live stream of the first day of the event, where the audience learned about Apple's new releases, turned out to be incredibly popular, attracting over a million Peak Viewers and thus becoming one of the most popular broadcasts of the year.
The updated MacBook Air, improved Mac Studio, new Mac Pro and iOS, and the Vision Pro virtual reality headset were just some of the announcements made by Apple at the presentation. As noted by Tim Cook, this year's new releases are among the most important in the company's history, so it's no surprise that there was such hype around the broadcast.
In total, the presentation lasted just over 3 hours and in that time amassed an incredible number of 2.3 million Hours Watched. The majority of the audience tuned in by the end of the first hour of the broadcast. The presentation saw 729K Average Viewers and over 1.08 million Peak Viewers.
The WWDC 2023 live stream proved to be significantly more popular among viewers than last year's event. The Average Viewers number increased by 37.4%, and the Peak Viewers number increased by 65.3%.
WWDC 2023 was very close of getting into the top-10 live streams of the year
WWDC 2023 turned out to be one of the most successful live streams of the current year in terms of Peak Viewers, although it was unable to break into the Top 10, occupying 12th place. Above it were football broadcasts — the final of the 2023 Campeonato Carioca between Fluminense and Flamengo, as well as the deciding match of the Spanish media league Kings League.
At the same time, Apple's presentation was able to outperform other popular live streams, such as the football match between Thailand and Malaysia in the 2022 AFF Championship and the February Nintendo Direct presentation.
The event was exclusively streamed on Apple's YouTube channel, but some viewers from other platforms were still able to enjoy it. For example, one of the most popular Twitch streamers, Felix 'xQc' Lengyel, watched the event with his viewers (although it is prohibited).
Apple's new products caused a stir among the Twitch audience — viewers actively discussed both the event as a whole and its individual products. For example, on the day of the event, mentions of Apple in the platform's chats increased by 486% compared to the average value of the previous week.
As for the products, the most discussed of the new releases was the Vision Pro VR headset, which was mentioned by over 2.5K people in chats, with a total of 3.7K mentions. The Twitch audience also paid attention to iOS 17 and the new M2 Ultra processor, as they were mentioned 3.1K and 2.4K times, respectively.
Apple's presentation is undoubtedly one of the biggest tech events of June, and the online audience's interest in it is understandable. However, Apple's live stream was not the most popular among those conducted by major US companies in 2023: the Starship Flight Test stream by SpaceX attracted significantly more viewers.
