In the battle for multimedia standards, Appleis QuickTime has been losing ground to Microsoftis Windows Media Player and Real Networksi Real Audio and RealVideo. While QuickTime has some major technical features not found in Windows Media Player or RealVideo, Apple has still not been able to win Mind Share over those two products. Yesterday, Apple announced that several of the largest consumer electronic and photography companies have adopted QuickTime as the standard multimedia file format for their digital cameras. According to Apple (including the fluff quotes):
Apple® today announced that many of the worldis leading digital camera manufacturers including Canon, Casio, Kodak, Olympus, Panasonic and Sanyo have integrated QuickTime™ technology into their products, establishing Appleis QuickTime file format as the industry standard for capturing digital content. QuickTime is Appleis industry-leading software for creating, playing and streaming high-quality audio and video over the Internet.
More than 75 camera models playback content using QuickTime, 25 of which also capture short video clips in the QuickTime format. As a cross-platform standard, QuickTime allows both Mac® and Windows users to assemble still photos into movies and seamlessly download and playback video clips captured on the cameras.
"QuickTime is rapidly being adopted by every major camera manufacturer," said Philip Schiller, Appleis vide president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "Beginning with this widespread adoption from the digital camera industry, weire seeing QuickTime extend beyond the desktop and into mainstream consumer devices."
"Sanyo is proud to support the QuickTime format with our digital cameras," said Makoto Harada, executive vice president, Industrial Video Division, Sanyo Fisher Company. "QuickTime is an excellent cross-platform moving image player, and its ability to play smooth, uninterrupted video enhances the performance of our video-enabled cameras, such as the IDC-1000Z iD SHOT."
"Coupling QuickTime technology with our next generation digital cameras simplifies the process of capturing and delivering images and video to the desktop," said Mary Miceli, product manager, Panasonic Optical Group. "Customers have responded very positively to the QuickTime feature because they recognize it as a branded technology and understand the quality advantage it provides."
As part of their adoption of QuickTime, camera manufacturers are displaying the QuickTime logo on their cameras and are providing QuickTime software to their customers.
Yesterday, Apple also announced the release of QuickTime 5 and QuickTime Streaming Server 3. You can find more information on QuickTime at Appleis Web site.