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NPR Drops QuickTime Support
Magnetic Confinement writes "NPR has decided to drop QuickTime from its available streams. Their help desk response is: 'NPR.org had been offering some of its audio in the Apple QuickTime format under an arrangement with Apple QuickTime. We regret that we were unable to reach mutually acceptable terms for a new arrangement with Apple QuickTime. As a result, NPR is unable to continue offering its content in this format."
This is a duplicate
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
What the!?!
An infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters still wouldn't repost stories on
Slashdot maintains its duplicate story support.
P.S. The "2 minute warning" on /. posts should be limited to 2 minutes between posts in a single story
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
I seem to recall this being briefly mentioned somewhere else before. Can't remember where I heard it.... Seems like it was recently, too.
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
You can't really do better than "Free", so they must want Apple to pay them extra $$$.
does this mean....I won't be able to see videos of Garrison Keillor (A Fairie Home Companion)?
Given that it's a radio show, I'd say the answer is probably yes.
I still don't get why National Public Radio is using Video formats for audio streams... why not just use some freakin' MP3? This is national and public right? Does it really need to be DRM'd?
Again... what is so hard about offering an mp3 stream? Then everyone could listen to it with any player they want.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
That must be why they cite and interview folks from the American Enterprise Institute so often, right?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I heard somewhere that NPR is going to drop quicktime support.
Has anyone else heard anything about this??
These pretzels are making me thirsty.
"free" as in "waste a huge amount of time installing and configuring a new system with a new OS they obvioulsy haven't used, not to mention maintain it?"
Nothing is "free" when you're a business. Everything is also a conspiracy when you're a mac user.
Went to the website, all I could find was realmedia and windows media. Where's the Vorbis stream? In particular, where's the Speex Vorbis stream?
I asked them for an .OGG stream and they told me to fuck off.
I don't donate to them any more - I'll keep on leaching. I feel a bit bad about it, but if they won't support open standard then screw them.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
I didn't even know they offered a Quicktime stream. Everything on their Web site is done with RealAudio...
NPR has to purchase NOTHING for this. QTSS, and their existing equipment with QuickTime frameworks, is all they need to stream this, and they don't need to pay for any codecs to do it. Either:
1.) They now want (more) money from Apple to do it, or
2.) Apple must not want to pay them to do it (any longer).
Please point me to where I or anyone else is required to "purchase" codecs from Apple for QuickTime either for streaming or playback (other than MPEG-2).
(This assumes NPR is using QTSS on Mac OS X Server, the only platform where it is supported by Apple.)
Lessee here...I see WMP and Real mentioned on the front page.
"Public Radio," my ass. They're just another example of boomers selling out to the "corporate masters" they complained about back in the 60s and 70s.
As an infrequent NPR listener, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft is at the root of this. Whenever I listen to NPR in the morning there is always a well-place MS "announcement" (read: advertisment - on public radio!) around 8am. I have no doubt that MS is threatening pulling its financial support if WMP is not the primary media player on the site. I bet Real will disappear soon, too.
If NPR were truly interested in being a user-friendly entity, it would post the stories in an .mp3 format and it would drop these ads for Microsoft and other corporations.
Meanwhile, I'm going back to Audible and the New York Times. At least I can deal with corporations that make it clear they're in it for the money, not some soft-and-fuzzy-bunny-bullshit smokescreen.
A few reasosn not to use MP3:
No multicasting
No native RTSP support
No good loss recovery mechanism
It's amazing that MP3 works as well as it does for pseudo-streaming, but a true streaming format it ain't. Personally, I'd like to see them adopt a MPEG-4 AAC-LC stream, which QuickTime, RealOne for Windows, and other ISMA MPEG-4 compliant players could tune into. Better quality at lower data rates than MP3.
Pretty soon we'll have AAC High Effeciency, which can do ~FM quality at 32 Kbps for 44.1 stereo. Astonishingly better than other propritary codecs in head-to-head at these low bitrates.
My video compression blog
Apple: NPR Drops QuickTime Support
oh, wait...
--jdp Maintainer of VisEmacs
First of all, it is a dupe. Just as a newspaper that publishes an article on Tuesday on page F3 and then again on page A1 the next day would be rightly deserving of criticism, so Slashdot is.
/. into Apple and everyone else is stupid. Apple people are not special. BSD people are not special. Linux people are not special. Windows people are not, well, I guess some might consider them special in an empathetic sort of way.
Second of all, I think this fracturization of
All of us have stronger interests in certain sections than others, but nobody should bitch and moan when something gets posted to the main section in a Slashback when its just not that important. It's just NPR. If you want an MPEG stream for public radio, scrap up some donated bandwidth and set up a Darwin streaming service for your local NPR station. If you volunteer to do it, maybe they would let you.
Bitching about NPR dropping a flavor of stream is like bitching at the Red Cross for dropping a particular color of Band-Aid at the bloodmobile. Get over it.
Some of us don't like Quicktime because it doesn't run on our platform anyway. At least you can snarf a copy of the W32 codecs and use mplayer, etc, to play the Windows Media streams (even you Mac folks).
Will that include the fabled MP4 Speech codec, that's been disabled in my QT6 dialog box ever since I bought it? I'm planning to encode and upload 2 hours of discussion soon, hopefully at 8Kbps or lower.
CELP? No, that's a different codec.
CELP might be largely bypassed in favor of AMR - Adaptive Multi Rate, which offers real-time scalability for speech. Good stuff.
My video compression blog
Well, yes. How can you make fun of the enemy if you don't take their quotes out of context. Get 'em Angie! You go girl!
This seems rather odd to me. With QuickTime Streaming Server (QTSS) being open source and Free, I can't imagine that streaming in Quicktime is any more expensive for NPR than streaming in WMP and Real.
sig my booty, check my website
I just registered a piece of software called Audio Hijack Pro which means I can grab this stuff and convert it to mp3. I love it, I take it with me on my 10 gig iPod, it's great. Now, I don't care if it's real or windows media or whatever.
NPR has a strange history of alienating people. For example, a snippet on Cory Doctorow's site boingboing from last June, then featured on TechTV's The Screensavers, told a strange story of NPR not allowing people to place an NPR link on their web site:
Examples of such "inappropriate" links include "certain kinds of commercial linking," [an NPR spokesperson] said.
"For example, if Salon.com writes a story about NPR and links to us, that would be fine," because the online magazine wouldn't be using the NPR link for its commercial benefit. "But what wouldn't be fine is if someone sets up a business to link to us and profit from that" -- for example, if someone sets up an online "radio station" whose main content was NPR's programs.
Pretty weird, huh? How exactly would anyone see any "commercial benefit" from letting their readers link to NPR? By that definition, ANYONE could be suspect of profiting from the link.
Wake up, NPR. Now Quicktime? Do you you all just hate the world?
Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.
Yeah, NPR is so left wing that they appointed Kevin Klose, Director of the International Broadcasting Bureau, as their president. The IBB is the US Government run network which operates the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio and TV Marti and Radio Free Asia.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
But of course you'd actually have to listen to the station to learn that, and that might interrupt your convenient "liberal media bias" myths that you can use to excuse the BS that O'Reilly and his ilk pull.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I was ignorant, and am now enlightened. More specifically, I was indeed thinking of MPEG-2, but only in a vague, I-should-have-checked-my-facts-first sort of way. I was under the impression that QTSS would stream various formats, but the only way to produce a QuickTime .mov was to purchase the appropriate codec from Apple. And, yes, I realize that's wrong, too. I was remembering some discussions about .mov playback under Linux, where one couldn't play certain .mov formats due to the Sorenson codec used to encode them, which was not freely available. I was under the impression that one licensed the codec from Apple. Whattheforkever, you don't really care about my rambling... for that matter, neither do I.
Here's a reply that I got from NPR asking for more information:
From: NPRHelp1
Date: Thu Apr 17, 2003 1:29:08 PM America/Chicago
To: "'Dave Schroeder'"
Subject: RE: QuickTime
Dave:
I've talked to our business affairs manager and this is the response he
asked me to give people who wrote in looking for additional information:
This outcome is the result of business and legal negotiations and we do
not discuss those negotiations. If you are asking whether this in any way
reflects on Apple QuickTime's technology, the answer is no -- business and
legal issues, not technological ones, led to this outcome.
I apologize if that's not the answer you're looking for.
Paul
> From: Dave Schroeder [mailto:das@doit.wisc.edu]
> Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2003 1:59 PM
> To: nprhelp@npr.org
> Subject: Re: QuickTime
>
> > NPR.org had been offering some of its audio in the Apple QuickTime
> > format under an arrangement with Apple QuickTime. We regret that we
> > were unable to reach mutually acceptable terms for a new arrangement
> > with Apple QuickTime. As a result, NPR is unable to continue offering
> > its content in this format.
>
> I'd like more information about this. Since the QuickTime Streaming
> technology is free and has no licensing restrictions, what do you mean
> you were "unable to reach mutually acceptable terms for a new
> arrangement"? There is nothing that needs to be arranged with Apple, or
> purchased from Apple (unless they were subsidizing your broadcast, or
> providing facilities and/or equipment, and did not wish to do this any
> longer).
>
> Awaiting your reply,
>
> Dave Schroeder
> University of Wisconsin - Madison
Funny.....you can perhaps also take a dose, in the fact that licensinc fees are perhaps not the issue. Also, Real is having a bang-up time with your personal info.
I used to listen to NPR a lot, until recently. They've been National Propaganda Radio ever since we invaded Iraq.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Now I won't be able to listen to communism now..er I mean democracy now from my computer.
Seriously it is kinda bummer, but lukily I can pick up our local npr station really well on my reciever.
One thing this typically meandering abortive /. thread refuses to comment on - and perhaps the only germane bit in the entire topic - is that this is a total bummer for all of us everywhere.
I think I speak for a lot of people who are constantly irritated by brain-dead webmasters who, just like their ISP support counterparts, cannot conceive of anyone not running Microsoft Windows.
Since supporting QuickTime costs NPR *nothing*--and since not supporting it costs all the Mac users at the heart of NPR's listening and donating community a *lot*--we should absolutely, positively donate *nothing* to any NPR member station unless national NPR changes this policy back and resumes its support of QuickTime.
If you agree, please write to nprhelp@npr.org to let them know that you will not be providing further support to your local NPR affiliate, as I have just done--and do your part to help launch the NPR donation boycott campaign.
so what action are we going to take? are we going to do anything at all?
any ideas?
actually, if you click on over to the Prairie Home Companion web site while the real-time broadcast is happening, you'll find that yes, you can watch a radio program over the internet.
It's a real treat if you can't conveniently travel to wherever the show is occuring and purchase tickets, or if you'd simply like to see what the stage show is like.
You have a choice of seeing a visual image presented from either a single camera view, or get better coverage from a 3-camera view, if you've got the bandwidth.
Since it is a web site of the local affiliate and not NPR, I see no reason to think that the imagery (whatever it is, I see no player requirement specified) will disappear.
I hope everyone is mailing thier complaints to them. I just finished sending mine.
fuck
this shit is getting really old
everyone is complaining about dupes. what about this comment? about the gazillionth time i have seen it, verbatim to boot. i got a troll for disagreeing with this guy last time, and no one will call his dupes. Anonymous Coward seems to get enough publicity around here, but you don't see people calling him out like everyone else. well i think you are dupes. i am starting to wonder if i am not a dupe. i am glad that everyone posted the same dupe comment too. i though it was "DERP!!!" not dupe. i am glad their is two of everything here, "one to take a dump and one to wipe my butt with" ~chris farley. i got a troll last time i commented to this one. i guess i am working on two. DUPE!!!!!
It is about the money... and why not, it doesn't grow on trees. People who work at the stations need to live, the station needs funds to transmit, to buy programming, buy equipment, etc. It takes time and money to maintain their website with multiple streams and formats. So don't be so naive. Public broadcasting needs money and they make BUSINESS decisions to support their efforts. Most of the public stations are operating under a shoestring budget even with your pledges.
RealPlayer support will be maintained for as long as it is feasible to do so, and if you want Ogg support, then there has to be a business case for it. For the idiots who think that Bill Gates pressured NPR to remove quicktime support... get your head out of your ass. As to the letter writing campaign, if you're so interested in hearing NPR in Quicktime format, then maybe you should write to Apple Computer instead of NPR.
Isn't that cute, the guy (AC) posting the offtopic question (grandparent, though that could be argued ontopic) is unmodded, but the guy posting an answer (and a scolding) is modded offtopic. Or maybe the moderators just didn't see the answer. Ah, well, that's what we have metamods for.
If I wanted to hear three hours a day of screeds about the role of labor unions and the peace movement in Berkeley, sure, I'd listen to Pacifica. But I think I'd rather ram an ice pick through both eardrums.