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QuickTime For All (2/11/98)
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Good news for Apple, and good news for the rest of us, too: a collection of computer technology companies that reads like a Who's Who of High Tech That Isn't Owned by Microsoft announced today that ISO, the international Organization for Standardization (yes, we know the acronym doesn't work; it's an ISO thing, you wouldn't understand) has accepted their proposal to make the QuickTime file format the basis for the development of a universal multimedia format, to be defined in the MPEG-4 specification. Apple, IBM, SGI, Sun, Netscape, and Oracle spill the warm fuzzies in a press release.
MPEG-4 is the next digital video standard currently being developed by the Moving Pictures Experts Group, whose current standard, MPEG-2, is used on DVD's and for digital video broadcasting. The decision to use QuickTime's file format as MPEG-4's basis is due in part to the already-broad acceptance of Apple's multimedia technology, which it claims is installed on over 50 million personal computers right now. Since so much existing and developing multimedia software is based on QuickTime, all of that software should be pretty easily converted over to the MPEG-4 standard, whatever it turns out to be. All in all, this is pretty huge news for Apple.
So, worst-case scenario: Apple's marketshare continues to dwindle, sales fall through the floor, Apple jettisons its hardware business, reorganizes, and re-emerges as QuickTime, Inc. The newly-reborn company provides top-notch, industry-standard, cross-platform multimedia software. And all 100 employees live happily ever after. ;-)
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SceneLink (442)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 2/11/98 episode: February 11, 1998: In a long-forgotten plot thread, a secret stranger waits and watches, preparing to emerge from the shadows to take control of Cupertino. Meanwhile, QuickTime gets its fifteen minutes of fame as the basis for the new MPEG standard, and the Newton is dead-- long live the Newton...
Other scenes from that episode: 441: We're Close, We Promise (2/11/98) Who else out there totally forgot that Apple's still looking for a new CEO? As strange as it sounds, we at AtAT would swear on a stack of Macintosh Bibles that that particular little plot twist had almost completely slipped our minds... 443: Newton Gets Macified (2/11/98) Mac OS Rumors has more on the fate of Newton, Apple's scrappy little handheld operating system that sits constantly with the sword of Damocles hanging over its head. According to their sources, that OS is indeed getting skewered and tossed out in favor of "Allegro Lite," a version of the Mac OS that has been run through a miniaturizing ray. Note, however, that this description of Allegro Lite differs from what other sources, such as MacWEEK, have been calling Allegro Lite: instead of a "thin-client" version of the Mac OS for handhelds, MacWEEK claims that Allegro Lite is Apple's repackaging of Allegro with fewer features, so that it can ship on time this summer...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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