May 15th, 2000

[2:40 PM] WWDC News: Lord Of The Rings Trailer Helps Push QuickTime To Over 50 Million Downloads by Staff As Apple announced that QuickTime 4 has exceeded over 50 million downloads, they were showing off a preview of the next version of the multimedia software. At today's WWDC, Apple announced that with the help of the Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and more recently The Lord of the Rings trailers, QT 4 has broken the 50 million mark. However, fans of the software are in for a treat. According to Apple: Apple® today announced that more than 50 million copies of its QuickTime™ 4 player software have been distributed for Mac® and Windows users worldwide, and gave developers at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) a sneak preview of the next version of QuickTime which will debut this summer. In addition, Nielsen//NetRatings has named Apple's Web site the most popular destination for movie trailers on the web.* Contributing to the success of Apple.com's Quicktime-based movie trailer section, downloads for New Line Cinema's "The Lord of the Rings" preview, encoded exclusively in QuickTime, topped 12 million since its April 7 debut, making it one of the largest online entertainment events ever. Additionally, Apple gave developers at WWDC a sneak preview of its next version of QuickTime, which will be available this summer and includes cross-platform support for MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, Flash 4 for web animation, and an enhanced QuickTime VR playback function providing unlimited spherical views of virtual-reality scenes. The new version of QuickTime also will feature QDesign software that has been optimized to take advantage of the Power Mac™ G4's Velocity Engine™ to encode music up to three times faster. You can find more information about QuickTime at the Apple web site. Apple