QuickTime 6 - 2 Cents

For multimedia producers, the big news out of Cupertino yesterday was Apple's preview of QuickTime 6 featuring the long-awaited support for MPEG-4.

I watched the live demonstration of QuickTime 6 over the net yesterday, and the quality of MPEG-4 was amazing. Quality, that is, in the sense of what you'd normally expect video encoded for web streaming to look like.

But while MPEG-4 may have been the headline, Flash developers will love the fact that QuickTime 6 finally includes support for Flash 5. That's a big deal for content developers, for it opens the door to more robust navigation and interface techniques that the Flash 4 plug-in simply couldn't handle.

Looks like we'll be waiting for QuickTime 6 for some time however. Apple is in a pissing match, rightfully so I may add, with MPEG-LA, a group of MPEG-4 patent holders who want to charge content developers royalties for using the format. How much? $0.02 for each hour of "for profit" material produced.

May not sound like a big deal, but could you imagine having to plop change into Apple's QuickTime player every time you want to create a QuickTime movie? Or rip an MP3? Beyond that, what exactly constitutes a "for profit" project? Who is going to determine the rules? Who is going to be assigned to making sure each and every content provider chokes up a couple of pennies?

If the proliferation of the internet can teach us anything here, closed scenarios like these simply don't work, and Apple is rightfully playing hardball.