Streaming Media - October/November 2007 - (Page 58) WHATEVER HAPPENED TO QuickTim By John Farrell For those of us who got our start in digital video years back with QuickTime (I still have my floppy disk with QuickTime 1.0 on it), it’s been disconcerting to watch the program’s apparent decline over the past few years. Flash has become the dominant form of media for entertainment web video delivery and is the backbone of YouTube and Google Video. While Windows Media and Real continue to dominate the market for enterprise streaming, QuickTime had a good hold on the progressive download market with its host of movie trailers and broad penetration in education—until Flash’s own video codecs improved. But the myriad interactive options QuickTime Pro offers never caught on with the majority of pro-tool developers before Flash took off and gobbled up that market as well. The convenient QuickStart guides to QuickTime stopped at version 6. In-depth books like Matthew Peterson’s Interactive QuickTime were hardly off the press, it seemed, before books on Flash and ActionScript upstaged them. The H.264 codec has taken Apple’s movie trailer page to a whole new level, but slick movie trailers have lost some luster with the advent of YouTube and Google Video, both of which are based on Flash’s Sorenson codec. And does anybody remember when Apple had the last QuickTime Live conference? 58 STREAMING MEDIA October/November 2007
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