Amaya Toman The fifth generation of QuickTime Player for both Mac and PC has been extremely successful. During the first year of its distribution, it recorded a respectable 100 million downloads, according to Apple, a million users downloaded it every three days.
Along with the fifth QuickTime came the announcement that websites support the MPEG-4 format. Online video was finally taking shape, and Apple was ready to take its chance. At that time, YouTube was not even in its infancy, so the Apple website, specialized in movie trailers, was a huge success. Millions of users have been massively downloading trailers for upcoming movies, such as the second episode of Star Wars or Spider-Man.
Launched in the late 1990s, the apple company's site quickly became the largest movie trailer site of its time. The people in charge at Apple were shocked by the low quality of trailers released by film studios - an example being Lucasfilm and its Episode I: The Phantom Menace. The meeting with people from Lucasfilm did not take long, and Apple started uploading trailers that looked much better on its QuickTim than the then alternative in RealVideo.
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Apple did not pay for the content as such at the time, but it was a clear win-win situation: the apple company could properly demonstrate its new technology and encourage as many users as possible to download QuickTim, while the movie studios got a free platform to promote their new movies.
"QuickTime has become known as the digital media standard for capturing, encoding and delivering content on the Internet," said Phil Schiller in a press statement in April 2001. He also emphasized that QuickTime 5 offers new possibilities for anyone who does more than just watch multimedia content , but also creates. The new update of QuickTim boasted a completely new, more elegant and refined user interface, a new Hot Picks content guide and a new, clearer display of QuickTime TV channels were also added. A DV codec has also been added, improving the speed and quality of video transmission.
New in the fifth generation of QuickTime player were also new tools for content creators, support for MPEG-1, Macromedia Flash 4 and Cubic VR, QuickTime Streaming Server came with a new patented function called Skip Protection, thanks to which the playback of videos from the Internet was much smoother .
These new improvements, along with the skyrocketing popularity of Apple's movie trailer site, were hugely responsible for the increased number of downloads for the fifth QuickTim. On November 28, 2001, Apple acknowledged that this was a truly extraordinary situation and issued a press statement to mark the occasion. In it, he officially announced that 300 users will download the new QuickTime to their PCs and Macs every day. According to Apple, a huge share of these record numbers was due to the high quality of the content of the trailers, as well as non-stop news from CNN or NPR. The trailers were a hit for another ten years before Apple began to phase out the site.
Source: Cult of Mac
