Why isn't Quicktime Streaming catching on?

applenut

It's really dissapointed to see the low acceptance of QT Streaming. Outside of a few big guys (ABC, Disney, WGBH, CNN, etc) it's near impossible to find any. And even the big guys are beginning to either reduce content or even get rid of it.



Everything is still Real and WMP is catching on quickly.



Quicktime Streaming Server seems to be very affordable and able to handle the loads. Very easy to setup. Quality is comparable to the others if not better in some cases.



S why are we not seeing smaller places using QT?

frank777

Maybe because smaller guys haven't been shown how to use it!



Try to find a half -decent tutorial on QT streaming on Apple's site. There isn't one.



There are promo pages for a bunch of separate products (QT, Broadcaster, Final Cut Pro, Xserve etc.) But there isn't even a diagram of how the "whole widget" works together or what different streaming set-ups look like or what they cost.



Apple should realize that the big guys won't adopt QT on their own - they'll naturally gravitate to the names that are well known in the PC space (i.e Real and WM.) It's the Mac Die-Hards and Web Designers that will give QT a lift. And right now, most of us have never done streaming before and could use some help.



Two weeks ago I appealed to MacWorld magazine for <a href="http://www.macworld.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=25&t=000339"; target="_blank">some help.</a>

eugene

Real and Microsoft pay sites to use their product. Real's really pushing their subscription pay service now for that reason. With all the people buying RealOne Player and paying for site subscriptions (Real gets a cut,) they make the money back...



Plus, they probably provide more support than Apple in return.



[ 06-01-2002: Message edited by: Eugene ]</p>

frank777

True, which is all the more reason for Apple to heavily promote QT usage to its current users and Web Design customers, who are more likely to implement QT right now.



A "How to build your own Quicktime TV station" web page can't be that expensive to produce.

ghost_user_name

In addition to the lack of tutorials, there also aren't many people out there that you could hire to set it up. So if your business was looking to implement a streaming solution, you would hire someone to make it work, and, well, Apple doesn't really push that, and there probably aren't a lot of contractors you would know to call that have experience with it.



Apple seems to believe that making the tools free will get them out there and get people using it. That just isn't the case, and they need to follow-through and push it a little more. Maybe have some QT streaming seminars at the market centers... it would be a start

singen

An advantage to other streaming solutions I've used is they can do encode and serve from the same machine, running the consumer OS.



As I understand it, and would love to be told this assertation is incorrect, Quicktime Streaming Server requires two computers. The one running QTSS needs to also be running Mac OSX Server.



Would love to start playing with QTSS, but don't want to shell out for OSX Server to experiment. Anyone got it to work on regular consumer-grade OSX?



Singen

eugene

Don't fret, you ARE wrong.



I'm running QTSS 4.0 + QT Broadcaster Preview and streaming live video to people as we speak...all on Mac OS X (Client.)



Audio still needs some work, but MPEG-4 video streaming is quite impressive.

singen

That's great news!



'm going to set up QTSS today and try it out. Woo-hoo!



Since I am behind a firewall, any funky things I should know about re: opening up ports?

escher

[quote]Originally posted by Eugene:

<strong>Audio still needs some work, but MPEG-4 video streaming is quite impressive.</strong><hr></blockquote>



I wonder whether QT6 streaming could be used for video-conferencing. After all video-conferencing is nothing more than streaming between two (or more) locations. IMO, it's just a matter of (hopefully short) time before we see a QT6-based video-conferencing iApp.



Escher

strangelove

[quote]Quality is comparable to the others if not better in some cases.<hr></blockquote>



that wasn't true until yesterday. quicktime streaming sucked big time. although the whole setup whiz-bang is a dream compared to wimp and real, the picture quality was **** .



but: let's just say i had some impression of how mpeg-4 was going to be, so try it for yourself: it's absolutely on par with the other guys. i don't bullshit you. we have akamai, cisco ip/tv and every other stuff you can dream of, and our tests show a huge leap forward.



right now we multicast the soccer worldcup on the internal gigabit-network and it really has come to its knees...



this is the first time apple is a real contender in the enterprise-level field...

jeromba

[quote]Originally posted by Frank777:

Try to find a half -decent tutorial on QT streaming on Apple's site. There isn't one.

<hr></blockquote>



and this ?

<a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/products/qtss/"; target="_blank">http://www.apple.com/quicktime/products/qtss/</a>;

stepson

[quote] I wonder whether QT6 streaming could be used for video-conferencing. After all video-conferencing is nothing more than streaming between two (or more) locations. IMO, it's just a matter of (hopefully short) time before we see a QT6-based video-conferencing iApp. <hr></blockquote>



They have it, basically, in QuickTime Broadcaster. If both client machines (macs) ran QTB and QT6, and connected to each other's stream, bam, Video Conferencing .

eugene

Yup, it works quite well for people with 128 kbps upstream connections. It's still not feasible to both upload a modem stream and download someone elses with 56k though.

jeremiah rich

I love what I have seen of Quicktime broadcaster, but always get an error when I do the first and default setting. IT says something about "broadcast state has changed"....

jeremiah rich

I also want to follow up to the topic brought up lol. I downloaded Quicktime Streaming Server tonight, and I have got to say it is really amazing me. I encoded a few sound bites, and they perform beautifully. Besides the quality of mp4, it was one of the easiest streaming server setups ever. If Apple can push this right, I think they have something great. When I installed windows media server or whatever it was called when I used to deal with Windows, not only did it take an outrageously priced OS, but it was pretty hard to set up, and was limited on the number of people you could stream to. This has got to be the coolest thing I have used from Apple so far. Now the only thing I need fixed is the problems I have had with broadcaster, and when my mini DV camcorder arrives next week, I will be all set.