The Rise and Fall of Quicktime and the Spiders from Apple

It’s a reference to the David Bowie album “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” and I think it suits the subject I will expound on: the rise and fall of Quicktime.

Once upon a time there were three behemoth video players known as Real, Windows Media Player and Quicktime.

These three video viewing programs controlled the way that people viewed video content on the web.

Most of the time, when you clicked on a web video, you had one of the three above mentioned programs open up an external window and ever so slowly load the video requested.

Let me back up a minute.

Actually most of us we were presented with a screen before the video content, a screen that demanded that we should download such and such an upgrade, or that a particular codec was missing and that we needed to scour the web, find the missing codec, and install it into the video viewing program that was having problems.

For a while people put up with this and over time Quicktime became a leader in video delivery. Apple fanboys celebrated Quicktime as the ‘de facto’ video player, and the Quicktime format soon rose to the top much like Ziggy Stardust.

Enter the Flash Video Player in spring of 2005.

With the introduction of the Flash Video Player across a wide swath of the internet market, people who designed web sites could now embed video *into* their designs rather than have a separate video player/window open up and obscure the wonderful web page that the web designer had worked so hard on.

Cool! Video was now being treated as *content* and not as a separate widget like thing that required nerves of steel and the patience of saint. (Patience while the video loads that is.)

The second part of what made Flash the dominate video codec/player was the fact that it only required a quick simple, in browser install. (Did I also mention that the Flash player would work in ANY browser on ANY type of computer?)

Within 16 months, Flash Video had dethroned the once mighty behemoth known as Quicktime along with the other two formats, Windows Media Player and the Real Player.

Quicktime wasn’t quick enough.

Windows Media Player just wouldn’t play.

And Real Player couldn’t keep it real.

Quicktime does continue on but not at rockstar levels.

Apple continues to push the Quicktime format through the popularity of the iPhone which is purposefully blocked from playing Flash Video, as well as using Quicktime to present all video content on the Apple website as well as all apple outlets such as iTunes.

Apple Movie Trailers

This is one place that I still see Quicktime regulary. Often i go to the Apple Movie Trailer website to check out movies I’m anticipating as well as preview movies I’ve never heard of.

This is one place that Quicktime seems to work very well. However I would need to see a direct Flash comparison to know for sure.

Apple’s Movie Trailer website is slick, well organized and the video is very crisp. The video loads and streams quickly and I have the option of viewing the material in many sizes and formats from sub-vga quality up to 1080 HD quality. I also have the option for most of the trailers to download a version of the trailer for my iPhone or iPod. Pretty cool.

Will this excellent integration of Quicktime save the ailing rockstar? I wouldn’t bet on it. The market penetration of Flahs is too great. The only way out of this is to create a revolutionary new video player that is integrated like Flash and that offers something that no other player can match.

What this new platform will be or if it even happens is anyone’s guess.

In the meantime: Will Apple finally get a clue and enable Flash Video on my iPhone? PLEASE?!

-Kirk