Forget Flash, How About Quicktime on the iPhone
Friday, January 30, 2009 at 7:00AM 
I know it sounds crazy at first... After all, can't the iPhone play QuickTime. Well, yes, some of it. If you navigate to websites with embedded Quicktime (A small portion of sites, but that's for another blog entry) you'll find some that have QuickTime that plays fine. As a matter of fact, for awhile, a site I previously worked on had functioning QuickTime clips, despite me not doing anything to them. Meanwhile sites like lynda.com cannot currently have their QT clips played on the phone.
Yes, they can tweak some settings to make it work on their end, but it makes a lot more sense to have Apple make Quicktime playback ubiquitous on the iPhone. It's their own technology after all! Even the Apple website isn't immune. As I tuned into the quarterly results conference call, I had to go on the road. So I thought, maybe, just maybe, the iPhone would be able to stream that QT content. Nope. The above message stating the iPhone version would be available later via iTunes. Apple, do you want QuickTime/h.264 to be a standard, or not?
The iPhone's QuickTime playback capability could be more accurately described as iTunes paid content playback. Is that by accident?
Apple, Quicktime, iPhone, quarterly results Permalink
Reader Comments (2)
why should it come as a surprise to anyone that apple's left hand doesnt know what its right hand is doing.
welcome to microsoft 2.0 ...
let's all enjoy the long painful ride down mediocrity that has become the SOP for QA at apple over the last 5 years.
sigh :-(
Good point. I think we overlook Quicktime because Flash is so standardized, but Apple should provide quicktime on all their devices. It's time for a wake-up!!