Apple Hoping for a Hit With Video Software
After years of fits and starts, the effort to bring sound, animation and video to the personal computer is gaining new momentum, and Apple Computer--with a software system called Quicktime--is hoping to lead the way.
At the Macworld show here this week, dozens of companies are demonstrating personal computer programs that use Quicktime to add video clips, slide shows, music and narrations to the text and graphics of a traditional Macintosh.
And Apple, in a bold effort to establish Quicktime as an industry standard for “multimedia” computing, said it was developing products that would allow the chunks of pictoral and sound information created with Quicktime to play on IBM-compatible personal computers.
Apple Chairman John A. Sculley called Quicktime “one of the most important products that Apple has ever introduced.” Provided free of charge as an extension to the operating software that controls the basic functions of the Apple Macintosh, Quicktime has been rolled out in stages during the past several months. It works on all but the cheapest Macintosh models.
A new computerized encyclopedia from Compton’s, for example, demonstrates Quicktime’s potential. It features pictures, sounds and brief film clips that elaborate on the text.
For the baseball fan, Voyager Co. of Santa Monica has launched a product that contains film clips of some of the most famous plays in baseball history, as well as the original play-by-play.
And children who enjoy the popular Kid Pix drawing program from Broderbund Software can now use Quicktime-capable Kid Pix Companion to play film clips and create slide shows from their drawings.
“With Quicktime, it was not difficult for us to put this very sophisticated technology in the hands of kids,” said Lawrence Comras, product manager for Kid Pix Companion. “
But Apple will have to overcome some significant hurdles in making Quicktime a broad-based standard. To begin with, the software requires a version of the Macintosh computer that costs at least $2,000, and taking full advantage of its capabilities requires an accessory known as a CD-ROM drive that costs $650.
Other companies, notably Philips with its CDI system and Nintendo with its forthcoming CD-ROM game, are promoting far less costly multimedia solutions that are specifically targeted to a mass market.
Moreover, while Quicktime uses software to compress pictures into a form that can be managed by computers--and thus doesn’t require add-on video processors--the quality of the video is poor. The images can be shown only in a small window on the screen and are very grainy compared to TV pictures. Higher-quality video requires expensive accessories.
Apple is trying to address the price issue. Just last week, the company declared its intention to be a major player in the consumer electronics market, and later this year it will introduce lower-cost versions of the Macintosh that include the CD-ROM devices.
An equally important challenge will be getting other computer companies to support Quicktime. Apple will be working with vendors of large, sophisticated computer systems to enable them to put information into the Quicktime format. Thus a weather simulation created on a Cray supercomputer, for example, could be made into a Quicktime “movie” and played back on a Macintosh.
But it will not be so easy to get vendors of competing personal computer systems--notably Microsoft, Tandy and the other supporters of the Multimedia PC standard--to support Quicktime. Apple said it was creating software for a Quicktime “player” that would enable computers using Microsoft’s popular Windows software to play Quicktime movies, but it’s not clear whether Microsoft--hard at work on its own multimedia software--will be willing to integrate that capability directly into Windows.
