Websites running away from Qucktime?

[mi5moav]

Another one bites the dust. First it was MSNBC that went windows only with their video clips. Now it looks like CNN is going Windows media only with their video clips. Does anyone know of a good news outlet that still uses QT clips and if no... why all the defections and does Apple even care about QT anymore? Does it even make any money off of it anymore?

[MisterMe]

Another one bites the dust. First it was MSNBC that went windows only with their video clips. Now it looks like CNN is going Windows media only with their video clips. Does anyone know of a good news outlet that still uses QT clips and if no... why all the defections and does Apple even care about QT anymore? Does it even make any money off of it anymore?

Have you forgotten what the MS in MSNBC stands for? As for CNN, you will notice that its news videos are now free. You will also notice that clicking to play them sends you to a window which implores you to download Windows Media Player. This is called an advertisement. CCN's news videos are now paid for by Microsoft advertisement money. Do you really think that it is in Apple's best interests to get into a bidding war with Microsoft over news videos?

[gerbick]

Well, let's see. BBC uses Real Player now mostly. They don't have any affiliation with Microsoft... nor Real for that matter.

It's all about choices, and lately, Quicktime gets bigger and bigger, filesize. And in the Flash that I use, *.wmv seems to be getting smaller and smaller. Especially when I use Microsoft's Media Encoder to crunch it down... does an even better job than Sorenson Squeeze.

[ElDiabloConCaca]

QuickTime movies have not been getting bigger and bigger in terms of filesize -- in fact, the exact opposite has been happening.

We first had .mov in the 90s (which is still used, filesize has remained pretty constant)... then we had MPEG4, which was MUCH smaller (and better!)... now, we have H.264, which makes the file size even smaller still (and even better still!)... when exactly did QuickTime file sizes get bigger?

Microsoft does have a pretty good stronghold in the small-scale streaming video market... it's unfortunate. QuickTime peaked every once in a while for the last 10 years or so, and was almost the de-facto standard in the beginning. It's unfortunate that a technology so widespread (runs very well on both Intel/Windows and Mac hardware/software -- unlike WMP) and transparent to the user is not dominant... but then, we have to remember that our computing world is dominated by Microsoft, so it shouldn't be surprising that use of WMP over QuickTime is extremely widespread.

A lot of websites used to offer a choice between 2 or 3 media players (WMP, QT, Real) and offered a "smart" preference so you only had to select once (probably a simple cookie on your system). That takes server space and triples the amount of streaming video support (in terms of both machine and human) those companies would require.

Sucks.

[Shookster]

I think Microsoft invests more in their streaming video technology than Apple does. It's because Microsoft desperately wants WMV to be the standard for Video On Demand and other such services. They would make a hell of a lot of money doing that.

[fjdouse]

As long as whatever is used is playable on Macs and as on as many platforms as possible, I'm not really bothered. But many sites I've tried using Microsoft video formats seem to offer poorer performance than Quicktime equivalents, never really objectively tested it though. Real as used on the BBC (and I use BBC pages a lot) seems to be very lumpy on Linux and Mac compared to Windows, again I've not wasted time testing it but that seems to be my impression.

[Randman]

It also matters that most of these sites aren't the friendliest to navigate through and so they cater to Windows folks, which makes up the most numbers. But, if you notice, most movie trailers are in Quicktime.

QT is doing quite well, on the PC and Mac side.

[fjdouse]

Although I did notice Revenge of the Sith didn't appear on the Apple site, unlike the previous two, I thought that was odd. Unless I just missed it.