MACWORLD Keynote Streamed To 25,000 In QT 6/MPEG-4, 25,000 In QT 5

by , 6:15 PM EDT, July 22nd, 2002

Apple announced today the numbers from last week's MACWORLD Expo keynote Webcast. The stream, which was available in both QuickTime 5 format and MPEG-4 (via QT 6), was broadcasted to approximately 50,000 people, something touched on by Steve Jobs in the keynote itself. The QuickTime 6/MPEG-4 portion of the streams -- totalling 25,000 -- were handled by four Apple Xserve servers and the latest array of QuickTime broadcasting software. In addition, the MPEG-4 stream was the first ever large-scale MPEG-4 event. From the press release:

“It’s exciting that MPEG-4 is immediately taking off as the new industry standard for delivering high-quality video and audio,” said Larry Horn, MPEG-LA’s vice president of Licensing. “MPEG LA is proud to play a supporting role in providing worldwide access to this innovative new technology. With wide support from industry leaders such as Apple, we look forward to MPEG-4’s availability for creating and streaming content to PCs, cell phones, PDAs and set-top boxes.”

Larry Horn's sentiments on MPEG-4 taking off are further backed by statistics that show that more than 1.5 million Mac and Windows users have downloaded QuickTime 6 during the first seven days of it's release. More information on the keynote broadcast statistics can be found in the press release. Information on MPEG-4 and QuickTime can be found at Apple's QuickTime Web site.

The Mac Observer Spin:

It surprises even us that QuickTime 6 has been adopted so quickly in the first seven days of its release, especially considering the renewed licensing requirements for the Pro version. This bodes well for the adoption of MPEG-4 as a whole, seemingly indicating that users are anxious to get their hands on the latest video and audio delivery formats. Not only will this expand the adoption of MPEG-4, but the adoption of QuickTime itself. In any event, the event served as an outstanding example to the industry of Apple's technology at work. QT 6, Xserve, and Mac OS X Server worked together to deliver some outstanding performance.

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