QuickTime Broadcaster Available

firegate writes "A lot of people have been thrilled since the release of Apple's Open Source Darwin Streaming Server. Unfortunately, to stream live video, you previously had to buy a product called Sorenson Broadcaster (Win/Mac). Apple has now released a tool called QuickTime Broadcaster which accomplishes the same task, except this product is free. From what I understand, this application is a scaled-down version of Sorenson's Broadcaster. Apple has only released a Mac OS X version of the program for now, so I guess that we PC guys will need to keep buying the Sorenson product for now. Hopefully, Apple will realize how profitable a Windows or Linux version could be."

Comments

What about Mpeg-4 licensing fees?

[Lenolium]

I remember a while ago, hearing about the MPEG-4 licencing schemes. Wasn't it like two cents per minute of live broadcast video? Since Quicktime's MPEG-4 implementation is the ISO standard, they can't even claim that they aren't using the standard specified so that they don't have to pay licensing fees. I guess MPEG-4 is going the same way as MP3, that there is someone out there who you (technically) owe money too, but nobody really cares. Sometimes I really wonder where the money is made in codecs, and remind myself that they don't always, thank you vorbis.

Profitable to be mac only - real world example

[Fished]

Currently, my church is almost entirely a PC shop (although I have snuck a mac os X server in.) However, the availability of tools like iMovie is making it increasingly atractive to move to Mac. One thing we've long wanted to do was real time web casting of our service ... well, guess what - if we can get the software free for the mac, and the mac has built-in firewire, and everything works out of the box for the mac, we'll buy a mac to do it.

And, unlike OS9, Mac OS X is really superior to Windows. Once Macs get in the door, they stand a real chance of taking over. So, where's the profit in giving away Windows software again?

selling the xserve

[tomdarch]

They will certainly keep it Mac only (at least for a while) in order to sell xserves. An xserve with free streaming software will be competetive with a WinTel box plus expensive streaming software. Thus more xserve sales.