Second part...
Inside iTunes: Part II
The QuickTime Media Layer: Apple’s Best Kept Secret.
Apple defined multimedia before it was even a term, with the announcement of QuickTime in May of 1991, and its introduction at the January 1992 MacWorld in San Francisco. QuickTime was an ambitious project. While it was initially derided as a ‘jerky postage stamp video’, the technology was more than just a cutting edge movie player running on hardware that wasn’t quite to the task; it was an architecture for playing anything time related.
QuickTime developed into being essentially an operating system for media. It can package audio, video, instructions, timecodes and other temporal information using a variety of codecs; different codecs offer strengths suitable for the task at hand and the type of media. QuickTime magically handles the translation between codecs, abstracts the differences in hardware, layers together tracks of data and effects and keeps them all in sync. QuickTime also provides a programing environment to control the playback interface and orchestrate interaction between different types of media.
Apple planned their vision for QuickTime to reach beyond the Macintosh. Later that same year, in 1992, Apple announced QuickTime for Windows. Apple delivered QuickTime 2.0 first on the Mac, and then on Windows in 1994. Since QuickTime was an integrated component of the Macintosh System 7 operating system, the Windows version had to include a direct port of a lot of the secret Macintosh toolbox code. Consequently, it largely bypassed Windows to talk directly to the video hardware.
Concerned about Apple’s encroachment upon the PC market they intended to control, Microsoft released a competing standard called Video for Windows. But their product couldn’t match QuickTime’s performance because Windows, as a graphic DOS application, had never been designed to work with media.
The following year, Apple brought a legal suit against San Francisco Canyon, the developer they used to bring QuickTime to Windows. Canyon had resold Apple’s intellectual property to Intel, who then provided it to Microsoft for use in Video for Windows. In order to catch up to QuickTime’s performance on the PC, the stolen code allowed them to bypass Windows and use QuickTime’s architecture instead. Apple later sued Intel and Microsoft directly, and Microsoft was eventually forced to remove some of the offending code.
Stripped of the stolen performance code, Video for Windows became synonymous, like Microsoft Bob and WinCE, with bad software. So Microsoft entirely scrapped the name and started over with a new plan of attack. Today, while Microsoft admits on their website to having released Windows 1.0 and 2.0, and even suggests that customers used them, they carefully make no mention of Video for Windows.
Meanwhile, by 1996 Apple’s Mac OS was stagnating and begging for an overhaul or outright replacement. But QuickTime continued to shine. Apple had introduced QuickTime VR for immersive video, a QuickTime Music Architecture and new QuickTime conferencing features, and QuickTime was establishing itself as the clear leader in the content creation and distribution. This positioned the Mac as the place to create content for multimedia CDs and the developing web audience, even while the Mac platform itself lost marketshare.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/insideitunes2.html
Third part...
Inside iTunes: Part III
Microsoft: We hate your baby, please kill it
Microsoft responded to QuickTime’s success with announcements for Active Movie and Active X, which planned to do everything QuickTime could do; it would even be cross platform. Microsoft even defined a new Surround Video product to compete with QuickTime VR. It turned out to be almost entirely vaporware, but the false promises did little to displace QuickTime as the architecture for video, music and other multimedia production.
Active Movie and Active X turned into little more than a movie playback system and an API for video games. Later renamed DirectShow and DirectX, it became Windows’ architecture for dealing with video and graphics. Failing to deliver on cross platform promises did not slow down Microsoft’s advances in the industry, but ignoring the Mac market did allow Apple a home base to continue developing QuickTime.
QuickTime continued to gain support from third parties with the announcement of version 3, which simplified playback within web browsers and offered a way to start Internet playback before the download was complete. This was a direct blow to Microsoft; after initially failing to anticipate the impact of the Internet, Microsoft was now determined to control both the desktop web browser and all Internet servers, particularly the potentially lucrative video streaming market.
Apple senior vice-president Avadis Tevanian Jr. testified during the Microsoft antitrust trials that Microsoft approached them and demanded they drop QuickTime as a content delivery system. According to Tevanian, Apple executive Peter Hoddie asked Microsoft officials, “Are you asking us to kill playback? Are you asking us to knife the baby?” to which Microsoft official Christopher Phillips responded, “Yes, we want you to knife the baby.”
Apple continued development on QuickTime despite efforts by Microsoft to use all their resources to obliterate the entire media content and delivery market. Further insult to Microsoft was caused by the ISO’s choice of Apple’s QuickTime, instead of Microsoft’s proposed Advanced Streaming Format, as the architecture behind the developing MPEG-4 standard.
Microsoft responded by announcing Chromeffects, a technology that promised to deliver complex multimedia over low-bandwidth connections. Using HTML, XML, C++, VBScript, and Jscript, developers would turn a web browser into a rippling, 3D space with audio and video playback. A MacWeek article from August of 1998 quoted David Card, an analyst at Jupiter Communications as saying, “[Chromeffects is] cool software, and it’s not often I say Microsoft has cool software. Apple doesn’t have anything comparable.”
By the end of the year, Microsoft had shelved Chromeffects and moved on. Apple jumped decisively into the video streaming, starting 1999 with a promotional film trailer for Star Wars that attracted 6.4 million downloads. In the same year, Apple introduced QuickTime 4, which introduced streaming using standard Internet protocols, and partnered with Akamai to set up a movie trailer download site called QuickTime TV.
Apple’s late entry into the streaming server market put it in third place behind the established Real Player and Microsoft’s movie player of the week. With really no way to get installed on new PCs beyond voluntary downloads, Apple’s movie trailer park was its best chance at distribution. Apple also bundled its software with an array of hundreds of digital cameras. While Apple had the technology, Microsoft controlled the software put on desktops.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/insideitunes3.html