BIG QUESTION/ QuickTime or WIndows Media Player

Question

Tomorrow morning i need to make a recommendation as to what product to go with for handling all web based video content. Stuff like streaming educational videos to live press feeds. Basically It's a no brainer for me, I say quicktime, but this would mean a complete overhaul off their network, which is fairly new. So the question is, what would be the definitive reason to go with Quicktime and what does it offer the WMP doesn't.
This will have an effect on a large amount of people that use windows based PC's. So Quicktime will be a hard sell, but I believe its the way our industry is going and has gone.
Any advise at all would be greatly appreciated. I have studied all I can and just need to hear from people who actually use these products.
Thank you..
G4 Dual 1.25 2 GB RAM, Mac Pro Dual 3.66 5 GB RAM   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

Answer 1

QuickTime is really a no-brainer.
Start on the content creation side: EVERY professional media production tool I can think of (well, except for those intended to author Flash...) supports QuickTime natively, most actually use the QuickTime frameworks internally. In my own shop, we use mostly Avid Xpress Pro systems, and every one of them can generate a beautiful QuickTime movie with very little trouble, but about half of the systems will obstinately refuse to export a watchable Windows Media file.
For the content itself, QuickTime provides a scalable multimedia architecture that can easily integrate into just about anything you want. QuickTime Streaming Server and QuickTime Broadcaster are perfectly capable streaming products, and if you don't want to invest in a MacOS server, you can run the Darwin Streaming Server instead; I believe we're running it on a Solaris-based machine here. Best of all, the streaming tools are free.
Are you into custom presentation and Web delivery? QuickTime is the only architecture I can think of that allows you to embed a custom player *into the movie itself*. Do you have special features you wish to include? Once I visited a web page where they used a JavaScript player, an ActiveX control, Windows Media Player, and a ton of JavaScript to provide multi-lingual subtitles for a news videotape. Had they chosen to use QuickTime instead, the text tracks and alternate audio tracks could have been embedded into the movie and some very simple JavaScript controls could have been used to control the QuickTime plug-in. Quite simply, if your needs extend *at all* beyond the most basic problems of presenting audio and video files, QuickTime has the technical capabilities that *no other multimedia platform* can provide. Yes, you can stream or serve any kind of video file. But if you want to go beyond that, you need QuickTime.
Finally, it's worth mentioning that QuickTime, unlike Windows Media, is truly a multiple-platform solution. It stops short of being totally platform-independent, but as a cross-platform architecture it again far surpasses Windows Media, in that the entire QuickTime architecture is available in the freely downloadable QuickTime Player for Windows. By comparison, the MacOS version of Windows Media Player is buggy, incomplete, slow, and was abandoned by Microsoft about four years ago. One may argue that QuickTime is not installed by default on Windows machines (so what? Windows Media Player is not installed by default on Apples, either!), but the market strength of Apple's iPod product line has largely taken care of that problem. Apple offers a generous distribution license for QuickTime, and at least when you install QuickTime on a Windows machine you get full QuickTime functionality.
In my opinion, the decision is still a no-brainer. QuickTime is the obvious choice for multimedia delivery.
Caveat: Do you expect any other opinion on Apple's QuickTime discussion board? Still, I think the case is pretty clear.
--Dave Althoff, Jr.