Until the Mac OS X sparks started flying, your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff was more than a little impressed with the announcement that Quicktime would be gaining real-time live video streaming capabilities this fall, via the rtp protocol. (Actually, we found it pretty darn impressive after the Mac OS X announcement, too, but this is an overshadowing rivalling how the iMac stole Wall Street's thunder.) This is good news for anyone who wants to send live video data out over the internet from their Mac-based servers-- and it may be great news for Apple, whose Quicktime gains another point favoring it as a potential industry broadcasting standard in the digital age. MacCentral's got some nice coverage.

This came as no particular surprise to any of us, as we'd been hearing rumors of such a development for a while. And if Apple ever wanted Quicktime to become any kind of digital broadcasting standard (and they obviously do-- recall, if you will, Steve Jobs' drooling, pleading pitch to the NAB several weeks ago), they'd obviously have to add some method by which live data could be transmitted. Still, there was something terribly exciting about seeing it work, with Steve's exaggerated antics going into a live motion cam on one machine, and being echoed in an Internet Explorer window on another. Nifty! Perhaps Quicktime has a shot as becoming the broadcasting standard after all... And the best news is, all developers need to do to add this capability to their applications is-- support Quicktime. The rest is built in.

As to why we were so impressed continues to elude us, given that we were watching the whole thing live, over the internet, via RealVideo. So it's not like this streaming live video thing is a new technology, or anything. We suppose it's partly just because it's being integrated into Quicktime itself, which is rapidly becoming the "Swiss Army Knife" of digital media. And the rest is probably just because it was an epiphany to see Steve Jobs making goofy faces in the middle of a Microsoft Word document. That's clearly a religious experience on par with finding the image of Elvis in a flour tortilla. We have seen the light!