In addition to previewing QuickTime 6 today at the Quicktime Live! conference in Beverly Hills, CA, Apple also previewed QuickTime Broadcaster, a new member of the QuickTime product family that allows live broadcasting of events over the Internet.
Live Internet broadcasting is being used for such things as corporate meetings, online courses, keynote addresses, entertainment, and other special events. It’s not available yet, but when it is, QuickTime Broadcaster will be distributed as a free download and will require QuickTime 6, Mac OS X (10.1 and later), Mac OS X Server, QuickTime Streaming Server, and compatible servers.
The new QT family addition will capture and encode QuickTime content, including MPEG-4, for live streaming via the Web. When used in combination with Apple’s existing suite of QuickTime products — QuickTime Pro, QuickTime Streaming Server and QuickTime Player — QuickTime Broadcaster provides customers with an inexpensive, end-to-end solution for producing live events, Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior VP of Worldwide Product Marketing, said during his QT Live! keynote address.
QT Broadcaster supports the broadcast of MPEG-4. However, just as with QuickTime 6, Apple isn’t distributing it until MPEG-4 video licensing terms are improved.
Features of QuickTime Broadcaster include: live encoding with real time preview; the ability to record and hint in real time to the computer’s hard disk for quick video-on-demand posting; support for all QuickTime codecs; AppleScript support; the ability to create custom settings; support for reliable communication via TCP between Broadcaster and Server; and auto configuration of the connection between the broadcaster and the server.