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.'"

Comments

WMP still No 1 and growing but slower than iTunes

[orlinius]

Did you notice that Microsoft is on a linear growth "curve" no doubt due to OS sales.
iTunes is growing faster though, so if this trend continues, in a year or two, iTunes will be the No 1 media player on the market. Not bad at all. God bless those iPods :)

Reminds me of Netscape when they launched version 4 and announced that Windows will become irrelevant as people will spend most of their time in Netscape. Is it possible that iTunes will do that in the near future as people will increasingly use their computers for entertainment (and not TV, radio, DVDs, outdoor activities, etc.)?

Who "uses" real player?

[glesga_kiss]

What is this figure trying to say? Is it refering to the installed base, as in, how many unique software installs you have? Or is it saying that you have X users who fire up the app everyday to browse their music?

If the former is the case, then it is completely bogus. It is very difficult to get Quicktime without the iTunes bundle, first you need to know that they are bundled, then you need to google the link as the standalone Quicktime installer is hidden away on the site. I've never found a link to it on the Apple site.

And everyone has the Quicktime player on their PC. It's in the list of bog-standard things you do when installing e.g. Windows for someone. Quicktime, Firefox, RealPlayer (maybe) and Acrobad Reader. The reason RealPlayer is a maybe is because they have been doing some pretty shoddy tactics to get their marketshare and profits up. Things like hiding the free cut-down version on the site, so that you have to download other nonsense that you don't want.

Sounds like Apple has been reading Real's playbook. Just because someone has iTunes on their PC, it doesn't mean that they are an iTunes user. Especially when they trojaned the iTunes install in via a Quicktime download. The bottom line however is that Apple want to be able to say to the music industry that "we have X million users" when really they are saying "we have X million users running iTunesService.exe, but only a fraction of them actually use iTunes, but we want to omit that detail as the former marketing point is technically correct and way more sexy".

Re:iTunes use surges past QuickTime?

[sakusha]

Precisely. I have been telling people for years, QuickTime is the crown jewel at Apple, and many of the most successful projects, like the iPod and iTunes, were created in the hopes of pushing QuickTime adoption on Windows.

As a web video and multimedia programmer, I have long wished for one universal standard based on QuickTime. Everyone's web experience would be so much better if we could all standardize around QT. But many times I encounter users who work in corporate IT environments with locked down PCs that are forbidden from installing QT. This seems to be a relic of olden times when online video and audio were seen as frivolous, and a big waste of bandwidth.

Re:iTunes use surges past QuickTime?

[squiggleslash]

That's an awful answer to an awful question.

Quicktime, like AVI, is a container. It forms part of a format, with the encoding of the actual moving images or audio waves being seperate from the encoding of the container. We generally seperate the two in terminology, the encoding of the images or waves being termed a codec.

In some cases, both formats use well documented codecs, in others they don't. A substantial amount of Quicktime content is encoded using Sorensen codecs. These are not documented, and due to a licensing agreement, are only available for Apple's implementation of Quicktime. Apple has veto power on what devices can use Sorensen codecs.

The reason, therefore, why there's no universal reader is because there cannot be. Microsoft, to use an example, cannot license "Quicktime" except for the publically documented, publically available, format and codecs. A substantial amount of content would not play under such a player. (Likewise, VLC cannot license most of WMV, though they're doing what they can.)