Whatever Happened to QuickTime?
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?
If you dig a little bit, though, you see that this picture isn’t as bleak as it looks on the surface. ITunes and your iPod and iPhone could not work without QuickTime handling the plumbing. And in all fairness, as Frank Casanova, Apple’s senior director for OS X video and audio product marketing pointed out, it makes more sense for QuickTime-related seminars and events to be incorporated into the WWDCs. "At the Worldwide Developers Conference this year," he said, "we introduced a new Content and Media track directed at developers creating content for the web, iPod, Apple TV, and iPhone as well as developers creating rich Web 2.0 applications for iPhone and desktop web browsers using open standards like H.264, JavaScript, and AJAX.
"WWDC is the perfect venue for all of our developers from traditional application developers to web and content authors. In addition to over 150 in-depth sessions, WWDC in 2007 had a ratio of four attendees to each Apple engineer, so it was easy to get all their questions answered and share code one-on-one with the Apple engineers."
According to Charles Wiltgen, a veteran technology developer and QuickTime specialist, "From a consumer point of view, QuickTime is all about being the great-but-invisible plumbing, whether we’re talking PC or iPhone, as it should be.
"Because it’s required by iTunes for Windows, it’s worth noting that it’s also required by proxy for iPhone and Apple TV, and also comes by default with Safari for Windows," he adds. "So it’s safe to say that QuickTime is on more machines than ever before, and I would expect that to continue." Additionally, the likely growth in mobile and MPEG-4 (AVC/H.264 and AAC) bodes well for QuickTime, Wiltgen says."I’d expect that most content developers have QuickTime installed, if only because most pro software can use it to support source formats that [Microsoft’s] DirectShow doesn’t," he says. "QuickTime Pro can be a handy little utility as well."
The Benefits of QuickTime
I currently work in media production for a publisher of college textbooks. Virtually all of our vendors deliver to us in QuickTime because it’s still the best format from which to transcode to others (Real, Windows, Flash FLV, and SWFs). From a video quality standpoint, the H.264 codec certainly leaves Sorenson in the dust for the moment and offers producers a higher-quality source format from which to transcode their content in multiple formats at even smaller sizes.
So in all likelihood, end users on PCs and portable devices are going to be seeing more—not fewer—videos and audio in QuickTime. It’s just that the software will be doing its job seamlessly, in the background. The QuickTime standalone player will be less and less in evidence.
This very seamlessness of QuickTime in its version 7 iteration, its behind-the-scenes success, is unfortunately what has undercut the interactive features of the trusty standalone application, which still allows you to do a lot more than Windows Media Player or any other beginner desktop video player.