Prepare for flip-flop! While we openly admitted our somewhat underwhelming initial experience with QuickTime 4's new live streaming capabilities (sound kept cutting out and video was unrecognizable via our measly 28.8 connection), we've got to say, things are already looking up. After letting our disappointment stew for a day or so, we stumbled upon a Mac Observer article about an Internet-based radio station that has already started to webcast via QT4-- even though the software's still in beta. Thinking that we'd probably have lots better luck with an audio-only stream, we clicked on over to Eclectic Radio's GoGaGa page to see what was up. And our experience was definitely a positive one.

When we clicked the "Tune In" graphic, at first we thought nothing was happening. After a few seconds, though, the sounds of a jazz quartet started flowing out of our speakers, in stereo, even though nothing on the web page had changed. That's when we noticed that the link had sent the URL for the audio stream directly to QuickTime Player, which was happily playing the music in the background. After choosing "Add Favorite" from the Favorites menu, we can now tune in to GoGaGa directly from QuickTime Player, without even running a browser. (By the way, if you give it a try, when they say "eclectic," they mean eclectic. We heard some Dixieland, followed by a polka, followed by something that sounded like some guy blowing across the top of a Coke bottle.)

Flush with success, we decided to give live video another shot, even though deep down we would never expect our slow connection to provide any reasonable results. In QuickTime Player we entered the URL to Apple's live BBC World webcast and crossed our fingers. Lo and behold, video from the heavens! Sound that we could hear and understand. Video that actually represented what it was supposed to be showing, complete with facial details and (occasionally) honest-to-goodness legible text (look, it's Mike Woolridge, live from Delhi!). In fact, doubling the video size made it look pretty darn good, thanks to our Rage Pro's built-in QuickTime smoothing. The Player reported a bitrate hanging out around 24 kbps, and a frame rate of between four and five frames per second. Frankly, we're amazed at how good this looks and sounds; apparently our initial woes were caused by server overload or something, because what we're seeing now is a lot more compelling than anything we've tried to watch via RealVideo-- and it doesn't litter the desktop with all those annoying .ra and .ram files. Apple may really be on to something here.