QuickTime makes good

MacWeek, Feb 16, 1998

Among technologies graduating from Apple's research labs over the past decade, QuickTime is again proving to be the alumnus most likely to succeed.

Last week the technology's winning streak continued when the International Organization for Standardization, better known as ISO, announced that it had picked QuickTime's file format for the next generation of its worldwide MPEG standard for multimedia. The current iterations of the ISO standard, MPEG-1 and -2, have focused on playing back moving digital images. The standards organization has recognized, however, that the future of media will be based on user interaction.

It's no wonder that QuickTime was drafted as the starting point for this richer interpretation of MPEG; QuickTime has evolved from a straightforward playback engine to a flexible container for varied multimedia file types and bit rates.

QuickTime is one of Apple's few crossover hits: a technology embraced enthusiastically by Windows and Unix heavyweights as well as by Mac stalwarts. It's a testimonial to Apple's prowess that such diverse industry contenders as Silicon Graphics Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc., Oracle Corp. and IBM Corp. were willing to back it. But the real work on MPEG-4 will hinge on the cooperation of a company conspicuous in its absence. Microsoft Corp.'s Advanced Streaming Format technology proved to be an also-ran with the ISO, but its acceptance of QuickTime as the core of the new standard will be essential if the companies' good intentions are to translate into actual tools and products.