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QuickTime On Your Cell Phone
blamanj writes "Apple and DoCoMo are confirming that a new version of QuickTime is on the way supporting MPEG-4 images over 3G cellular service." Now if only these would make sense in the U.S. ...
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The only reason they keep trying to add such technology to phones is so they can continue to rip you off with their charges. Do you really want to pay air-time rates to watch tiny tiny tiny movies?
Here in the UK the mobile phone companies need their clients to spend an average of £50 per month ($70-$80) just to allow them to recover from the enormous debts of the 3G licences they lumbered themselves with.
My bill is much less than that a month, and I really don't intend to use any gimicky technology they offer me to tempt me to pay them stupid amounts of cash.
Makes MMS look positively naff, why send a single picture when you can send a video stream ?
BUT if you think about the bandwidth requirements of streaming then it becomes hard for the mobile infrastructure to support.
20 million phones, say only 1% active at a time means 200,000 phones active, each streaming at 256 kilobits means 6400000 kilo bytes of bandwidth required. In other words that is 6.4 GigaBYTES of bandwith required by the mobile network.
Video is a nice idea, and for low usage it works okay within a network, but either the quality has to be crap, or the network investment has to be huge to support video-phone technology over IP. There are better compression elements out there that could work at 64 kilobits, but that is still over a Gigabyte per second network.
AND that is just for a country with only 20 million mobiles.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
QuickTime is NOT A CODEC, it's an architecture that supports HUNDREDS of graphics, sound and movie codecs - along with sundry other formats like FLASH 4, text layers, sprites etc etc etc. That's why MPEG-4 was based on it - it's fucking beautiful! So, if you 'phone had QT, you might be able to take a series of pictures, compile them into an image sequence and send them to a friend as an MPEG4 movie stream; or maybe compose a ring tone as MIDI and send it somewhere; or open a TGA or TIFF file, or a wav, mp3 or aiff file etc etc etc
That was classic intercourse!
There may well be soon. Remember that the number of people who own mobile phones is numbered in billions.
If the trailers are free of charge or minimal charge kids, in the UK at least, will use the service and then video phone to their mates to arrange to see the film etc. etc. etc.
The issue here is for future market share available - not current market share. The estimates for increases in Linux desktop share are, I would imagine, far lower than the number of people expected to move to 3G mobile system in the next 3 years.
By getting Quicktime onto phones Apple provide a way to sell their encoders and lever Microsoft's format off of the mobile platform.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
Microsoft and Real incorporate Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology in their file format, giving companies an added feeling of security when publishing their content. This, Jones thinks, could be a disadvantage for Apple.
"The big hurdle that QuickTime has to clear is that it isn't a nicely bundled solution of video creation management and security," said Jones. "They don't have some of the content management and DRM capabilities that Real and Microsoft have."
Everyone else calls that a plus. No DRM, no security, less crap to deal with.
On another note, someone was asking whether there was truly a greater demand for this than a Linux port of QT. Perhaps there is, but also, this could be a way to pave the road for video phones.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
I dunno...the abitily to launch surface-to-air missiles with a cellphone would be pretty groovy. (Obligatory USA PATRIOT Disclaimer: I am NOT advocating or planning any terrorist activities.)
Actually, I'm of the opinion that extra features in a cellphone generally suck. I just cancelled my web access ($5/month) on my SprintPOS (er, PCS) phone because I never use it.
Right now I want exactly TWO things from my cellphone: decent coverage area, and Bluetooth capabilities to I can use my iBook to surf from wherever and keep all my phone #s straight between my Palm, iBook, and cellphone (because I have so many floating around, I never remember them all).
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