Is it just us, or is anyone else out there tired of waiting for QuickTime 4.0? (And we personally don't even need it!) It seems like it's been "just around the corner" for half a year now-- or, at least, the most important feature of QuickTime 4.0 has, at any rate. We're talking about streaming video, the technology that will bring QuickTime into the same league as RealVideo and Microsoft's NetShow. QuickTime is great, but if you want to use it to broadcast live video over a network, you're pretty much out of luck-- and that fact had led some very large and important web sites to ditch their QuickTime content altogether. After all, why support multiple formats?

So Apple has been promising streaming capability for QuickTime for a long time now. Heck, Steve Jobs even demonstrated the technology earlier last year, by sticking his live face into the middle of a Microsoft Word document. Streaming QuickTime looks nifty, and it offers a couple of vast advantages over its competitors. First of all, it's still QuickTime, so any application that can show a QuickTime movie can also show a live broadcast-- no extra work for applications developers. And secondly, Apple's reportedly making the server technology open-source, so that anybody can throw together his or her own broadcasting server product. You'd think with those advantages, QuickTime should really be able to clean up in the streaming media market. Unfortunately, it's not around to compete, having missed its most recent anticipated ship date of the last Macworld Expo. The last we'd heard, QuickTime 4 would finally make an appearance in February.

Or maybe not. According to Apple Insider, after missing its last ship date, QuickTime 4 has been downgraded on the Hurry Scale. While a February release still looks likely, their sources claim that it may not see the light of day until as late as the National Association of Broadcasters conference in April. Granted, that would be a great event at which to take the wraps off of the new technology, but we wonder at what point the people who count might just say, "too little, too late." QuickTime 4 sounds like it'll be Insanely Great, but it may also be labeled Insanely Late.