Streaming Media - October/November 2007 - (Page 62) interactive features dates back to the return of Steve Jobs, according to Peter Hoddie, Apple’s former QuickTime architect who worked on the software from early 1991 through 2000 and is now president of Kinoma Inc. “When Steve Jobs came back, all aspects of the company’s products were revisited,” he says, “and there was a big push that we focus QuickTime around video and streaming. But the other piece of it is that many of the engineers on the QuickTime team working on interactivity began to move on.” If you go to Apple’s website, the QuickTime page is not as prominently featured as it used to be. You need to dig down into the Mac section to find it. But it still boasts a tab for interactivity, which suggests a commitment, even if it’s not clear from Apple’s own testimonials why a new developer would go with QuickTime over Flash for interactive projects. “Content developers can rest assured the content they create in QuickTime can play across the widest range of devices and platforms in the industry,” says Casanova, “and because QuickTime is a According to Wan, many interactive features were added to QuickTime in the program’s early years by various team members. These features took on a life of their own. “It almost seemed that engineers with enough clout within the QuickTime team were tinkering with various interactive/media technologies and kept adding features to QuickTime on their own,” he says. “Along came companies like Totally Hip,” says Wan, “who took advantage of these interactive features within QuickTime to create a market with tools and support. In a sense, Apple lost control over this part of QuickTime. “However, more to the point is the simple fact that there is no money in it for Apple to support the interactive features within QuickTime. You can see the clear revenue streams for pro video—but interactivity?” Still, in spite of this sobering truth, there are many developers out there, for education and business, still authoring in QuickTime. They haven’t made the switch to Flash, and they aren’t yet planning too, preferring still to deliver interactive or “wired” content in Apple’s program. whatever happened to QuickTime? Far Left. The University of Pittsburgh’s James Rieker used QuickTime as a palette to lay out the talking head with the slides and video for this site, but then converted it to Flash for actual delivery. Near Left. These days, much of the interactivity in QuickTime is limited to simple, serviceable functions like chapters, as shown in the lower right here. fully API-supported architecture (many of our competitors offer only a player) software developers can integrate QuickTime functionality into their own applications and products as they like. Dozens of new third-party, QuickTime-based products ship every month.” Israelson takes a more somber view. “The problem for a developer,” he says, “is that QuickTime is no longer moving forward. It is in a holding pattern. Interactive bugs I filed four years ago have yet to be fixed. Not because the engineers can’t fix them, but because management won’t let them touch that code. “I personally think QuickTime has no future except for audio and video,” he adds. “Perhaps that is as it should be, since trying to hack in an interactive environment onto a video player is the wrong approach anyway.” Selwyn Wan is similarly philosophical about it. “From my perspective, Apple has been trying to rein in the features of QuickTime since the mass exodus of QuickTime team members a few years ago,” he said. 62 STREAMING MEDIA October/November 2007 Who’s Using QuickTime Today? I checked in with developers and vendors to see who is still using QuickTime and how it best serves them. Frank Lowney, director of web-enabled resources at Georgia College and State University’s Library and Technology Center, says, “We still prefer to use ‘wired’ QuickTime over Flash primarily because we do such a wide range of things and QuickTime is more comprehensive. Flash has made advances in linear video quality but still lags in VR and a few other esoteric areas that are important to us. We may eventually switch, but right now, I can’t afford the [additional] personnel. Nonprofits are uniquely affected by this factor.” “My main use of it these days is transcoding to 3GP with QuickTime Pro,” says Nels Johnson, contributing editor at DV magazine and president of Dowload Recordings, “not to mention swapping English-language tracks into European movie torrents.”
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