QuickTime Got an Emmy

On the 25th of January, 1949, the first Emmy Awards were presented at the Hollywood Athletic Club, and Shirley Dinsdale had the honor of receiving the very first Emmy in the first awards ceremony. These awards are similar to the Peabody Awards but more focused on entertainment, and considered to be the TV equivalent of the Oscars.

Emmy Awards are presented by three related yet separate organizations - the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and the International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Don't worry, I won't tell you more about these, but get straight to one of the awards given by the National Academy of Television recently...

In a ceremony that took place at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Apple got a technology and engineering Emmy award for its QuickTime technology, and shared the Streaming Media Architectures and Components award with Adobe, Microsoft and RealNetworks.

Frank Casanova, Apple's Senior Director for Mac OS X Audio and Video said that "We were thrilled that they [the NTA] recognized the work that we have done on behalf of the standards community. They recognize the work we continue to do to promote H.264 and MPEG-4."

MPEG-4 became an industry standard for audio and video compression widely used, and H.264 is a video codec that's a part of this standard and is used with video from iTunes, in iChat's video conferencing and also a key software component of the upcoming Apple TV.

According to Casanova, MPEG-4 and H.264 are the weapons that give Apple an advantage when confronted with the others. "What really sets us apart from all the other guys [Adobe's Flash, RealNetwork's RealPlayer, Microsoft's Windows Media], is that we've adopted a set of beliefs around open industry standards, while the other guys have stuck to their guns using in-house proprietary technologies."

There's no need to go through tons of technical mambo-jumbo to figure out that QuickTime is a solid and popular product, despite what some people may think about it, since one million copies of QuickTime are distributed daily through Apple's website, and half a billion copies have been downloaded since the release of version 7, less than two years ago.