Whatever Happened to QuickTime?

It did, right from the beginning. In the early days of multimedia production, QuickTime was the dominant means of video delivery (even when the grainy Cinepak format was the only game in town), and one of its niftiest features was its ability to work with professional authoring programs like Macromedia Director, Sound Edit Pro, and later on, Flash.

You could add multiple audio tracks to a QuickTime movie for English- or Spanish-option audio playback—which was a must for a publisher trying to land an adoption in Texas or California. You could lay down cue points in QuickTime soundtracks with Sound Edit, which could be used to trigger various interactive elements in a program. And you could create separate sprite tracks with their own interactive features. Just for starters.

As one example, when I was working on an interactive tutorial for Harvard Medical School, we were just beginning to implement a simple but effective DRM feature on the QuickTime progressive downloads. The poor quality of streaming in Real discouraged the medical directors of the program; they wanted the higher quality that QuickTime delivered in progressive mode, but they were worried about the content being copied and ending up on other websites. Matthew Peterson’s solution, which he outlined using Totally Hip’s LiveStage Pro, was just the answer for us. We coded some Qt Script tracks in the movies, which blocked any viewing of content if the movie found it was no longer on its home server.

Speaking of Live Stage Pro, another sign of interactive QuickTime’s eclipse is dramatically illustrated by the decline of that authoring program—it has been dormant since its last version (developed specifically for QuickTime 6), with no apparent plans for a version to work with QuickTime 7. Lead developers Steve Israelson and Selwyn Wan, two of the original Totally Hip founders, have left the company to work independently.

"I was the main and usually only Mac programmer for LiveStage and also its architect," Israelson says. "Selwyn was the lead programmer for the Windows version. Together, we put together the last few versions of LiveStage. We still have many ideas that would make LiveStage even better. The grim reality is that the sales of LiveStage did not support its development and thus further development on it was halted.

"Apple helped us a lot with great technical support," he adds, "and the help of the QuickTime engineering team. The direction Apple has taken QuickTime, however, did not help us at all. Just when we came out with several great components for QuickTime to support better scripting and spectrograms, Apple halted the component download program. You can see what direction they are going very clearly. Basically they appear to want to delete everything except industry-standard video and sound."

Whither Interactivity?
The change in Apple’s attitude toward QuickTime’s interactive features dates back to the return of Steve Jobs, according to Peter Hoddie, Apple’s former QuickTime architect who worked on the software from early 1991 through 2000 and is now president of Kinoma Inc. "When Steve Jobs came back, all aspects of the company’s products were revisited," he says, "and there was a big push that we focus QuickTime around video and streaming. But the other piece of it is that many of the engineers on the QuickTime team working on interactivity began to move on."

If you go to Apple’s website, the QuickTime page is not as prominently featured as it used to be. You need to dig down into the Mac section to find it. But it still boasts a tab for interactivity, which suggests a commitment, even if it’s not clear from Apple’s own testimonials why a new developer would go with QuickTime over Flash for interactive projects. "Content developers can rest assured the content they create in QuickTime can play across the widest range of devices and platforms in the industry," says Casanova, "and because QuickTime is a fully API-supported architecture (many of our competitors offer only a player) software developers can integrate QuickTime functionality into their own applications and products as they like. Dozens of new third-party, QuickTime-based products ship every month."

Israelson takes a more somber view. "The problem for a developer," he says, "is that QuickTime is no longer moving forward. It is in a holding pattern. Interactive bugs I filed four years ago have yet to be fixed. Not because the engineers can’t fix them, but because management won’t let them touch that code.

"I personally think QuickTime has no future except for audio and video," he adds. "Perhaps that is as it should be, since trying to hack in an interactive environment onto a video player is the wrong approach anyway."

Selwyn Wan is similarly philosophical about it. "From my perspective, Apple has been trying to rein in the features of QuickTime since the mass exodus of QuickTime team members a few years ago," he said. According to Wan, many interactive features were added to QuickTime in the program’s early years by various team members. These features took on a life of their own. "It almost seemed that engineers with enough clout within the QuickTime team were tinkering with various interactive/media technologies and kept adding features to QuickTime on their own," he says.

"Along came companies like Totally Hip," says Wan, "who took advantage of these interactive features within QuickTime to create a market with tools and support. In a sense, Apple lost control over this part of QuickTime.

"However, more to the point is the simple fact that there is no money in it for Apple to support the interactive features within QuickTime. You can see the clear revenue streams for pro video—but interactivity?"

Still, in spite of this sobering truth, there are many developers out there, for education and business, still authoring in QuickTime. They haven’t made the switch to Flash, and they aren’t yet planning too, preferring still to deliver interactive or "wired" content in Apple’s program.

Who’s Using QuickTime Today?
I checked in with developers and vendors to see who is still using QuickTime and how it best serves them.

Frank Lowney, director of web-enabled resources at Georgia College and State University’s Library and Technology Center, says, "We still prefer to use ‘wired’ QuickTime over Flash primarily because we do such a wide range of things and QuickTime is more comprehensive. Flash has made advances in linear video quality but still lags in VR and a few other esoteric areas that are important to us. We may eventually switch, but right now, I can’t afford the [additional] personnel. Nonprofits are uniquely affected by this factor."