QuickTime 6: 250 Million Downloads and Counting


Apple has announced that there have been over 250 million downloads of QuickTime 6 in less than two years since its release.

"QuickTime 6 is by far the most popular version of QuickTime ever distributed, with over 250 million copies downloaded and counting," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "With QuickTime 6, Apple continues to be the industry leader in providing an
end-to-end standards-based digital media delivery system."

As Apple's PR puffs, QuickTime is used in over 225 digicams from more than 50 camera makers. And, of course, QuickTime is the file format for MPEG-4. Moreover, both Apple and Filemaker Inc. have pushed successfully for widespread QuickTime adoption via 3GPP and 3GPP2 mobile networks.

Analysis: It's certainly been more successful than QuickTime 5, which topped out at around 100 million-odd downloads. The question is why support for the format at streaming audio/video sites is so thin. True, it's third in the market behind RealPlayer and Windows Media, but I, for one, always have problem with these latter two formats. Often, you find a file that won't play on your version of the software (and you're constantly urged to 'upgrade'). Frankly, I couldn't be bothered with every dot-point 7-10MB download on a modem. At least QT 6.0 still works fine for most things, even without the dot-point updates.