Tag: 02121530

Today at QuickTime Live!, Apple previewed QuickTime 6, the next major version of its multimedia technology. Among the features of QuickTime 6 is full support for MPEG-4, a streaming media format for high quality content. While Apple noted that QuickTime 6 is complete and ready for release, it is delaying the product due to the currently proposed licensing fees covering MPEG-4. The current license agreement requires royalty payments from both those who ship codecs and from content providers who use MPEG-4 to stream video.

Apple today also previewed QuickTime Broadcaster, a new product for live Internet broadcasting. QuickTime Broadcaster will support both capturing and encoding of content with support for all QuickTime codecs, including MPEG-4. As with QuickTime 6, however, the software’s release has been delayed pending changes to the MPEG-4 licensing agreement. QuickTime Broadcaster will be available as a free download.