Apple’s QuickTime is ignored in a new Washington Post article that looks at streaming media and Internet video.
The writer for the article, Leslie Walker’s, only looks at RealNetworks and Microsoft’s products. She writes that of all the Internet’s multimedia wannabes, one that may have decent odds of survival is RealNetworks, “the Seattle company that in 1995 pioneered the Web’s first method of transmitting sound in real-time.”
“It and Microsoft Corp. are in a fierce fight for market leadership (is there really a market?) in the software that ‘streams’ audio and video, a technique that lets you start listening or viewing files before they finish downloading to your computer,” Walker writes. “RealNetworks claims it has 600,000 paying members for the souped-up entertainment subscription service it launched five months ago on a business model that mimics cable TV. People pay $10 to $20 a month for access to the RealOne service, which includes a tiered assortment of live and pre-recorded music, sports, news and entertainment. While it doesn’t have feature-length movies, RealOne offers news and sports fare from TV networks and gives the networks a cut of its subscription and ad revenue.”
Like so many others in the mainstream media, she simply overlooks QuickTime entirely. Perhaps Apple needs to do a better job of promoting its own technologies and products. Either way, with RealPlayer (much less the RealOne service) not available for Mac OS X, it’s sad to see articles like this give RealPlayer the benefit of the doubt.