Oh, that Apple-- ever selflessly championing the establishment of industry standards for the benefit of the little guy. Why else would the company (together with Sun, Cisco, Philips, and Kasenna) sign on as a charter member of the Internet Streaming Media Alliance, as reported by Macworld? Together, the five companies comprising the ISMA hope to create a single, universal, open standard for the streaming of audio and video over the Internet.

Clearly, Apple wishes to spare the world the frustrating juggling act necessitated by installing and maintaining three or more separate streaming media architectures on each computer, just to be able to access content from different sites. Were you aware that not every site streams their video content via QuickTime Streaming? Strange but true! Every so often, surfers who check in at the more obscure sites (like, say, CNN) discover that the videos are only available in arcane and obscure formats like "Windows Media" or "RealVideo." This discovery prompted Apple to wonder, "gee, wouldn't it be terrific if all video content on the 'net was streamed according to one standard? Imagine how much time, money, and disk space the noble consumer would save-- not to mention the webcasters themselves!"

Now, it's important that you don't read anything into the fact that the purveyors of non-QuickTime streaming technologies (whoever they might be) haven't yet signed on with the ISMA. We're sure those little guys are just too busy raising venture capital in order to get their businesses off the ground, but they'll join up as soon as they get a little breathing room. In the same vein, just because Apple's the only ISMA member who actually makes a streaming media architecture, you shouldn't see this effort as a thinly-veiled partisan ploy to establish QuickTime as the official granddaddy of all media. Got it?

Okay. As for the ISMA's plans to establish this holy grail of a standard, the first step is to draft "an initial specification for MPEG-4 over IP." Hey, wait a minute... isn't MPEG-4 based on QuickTime's file format?...