Slashdot Mirror
iTunes Use Surges Past QuickTime, RealPlayer
QuatermassX writes "Forget increased sales of Mac computers, think media players. The iPod 'halo effect' shows its true power in recently compiled statistics from Nielsen/NetRatings and Apple. From the report on WebSiteOptimization.com: 'Podcasting is taking off and iPods are seemingly ubiquitous. Unique users of Apple's iTunes player should pass RealPlayer by mid-2006 with nearly 30 million users in the US alone. People are tuning in over twice as long with iTunes than with RealPlayer or Windows Media Player. As broadband penetration increases we are spending more time on our computers.'"
I wouldn't rule out the fact either that iTunes has a slick interface that makes organising your music, buying music, podcasting, listening to internet radio and so much more, really easy. Try saying that about RealPlayer.
iTunes is sorely lacking in so many areas too!
'Automatic updates' consists of downloading a 35Mb new iTunes setup package each month or so...
The library doesn't update itself automatically...
There's no concept of 'checking for existing entries on import' - importing the same folder will just give you each track twice...
It doesn't work very well at all with keyboard shortcuts...
No plugin facility...
It's weighty as hell in memory...
but yet, after all these sore points, somehow, it's way cooler than WMP, RealPlayer, and sod it...anything else I've seen.
If Apple were a woman, she'd be a sexy slim figure - and you'd buy anything shite from her, just because she was so damn fine! Not like the fat moose of a wreck a Microsoft woman would be - she could be selling the moon on a stick, and you wouldn't touch it with a barge pole!
And on that note, perhaps I should mingle with real people some more.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Chances are that they're following the age old corporate habit of following completely unreliable and sometimes unrelated statistics. For example, downloads doesn't equal users (See: Browsers, Chat clients, Websites, etc), discovering more bugs doesn't make the product insecure (See: Browser and Operating system security debates.), etc. However 9 times out of 10, someone will make an outrageous claim based on these statistics, and people, not knowing better, will write articles about it. In the end it's just publicity.
Apple will always look bad in my eyes as long as they seek to lock people in via proprietry formats that they strictly enforce to prevent competition.
.mov files you're having trouble with, what codec was used for those? Also, I'm not very familiar with what's available for Windows, but on the Mac there are all kinds of full screen players that play .mov files, including VLC. So you don't have to pay.
OK, lets look at the current streaming formats .
1) WMV using proprietary codec controlled by MS.
2) Real media using a proprietary codec controlled by Real
3) MP4 media is an industry standard controlled by the MPEG and used by Apple and anyone else who cares to license it.
All these formats support the optional use of DRM. As for the