digital music/video
03/16/2006, 9:15am, EST
Thursday, March 16th
iTunes passes QT, RealPlayer next
Apple's iTunes is quickly becoming the media player of choice for users of streaming media. Already the fast growing media player in terms of unique users, Apple's QuickTime-based jukebox software surpassed its own QuickTime player in mid-2005, and at current growth rates should pass RealPlayer by mid-2006, according to recent data from Nielsen//NetRatings and Apple. In January of 2006, the data showed about 71 million unique users for the market leading Windows Media Player, just over 28 million users for RealPlayer, 18.5 million for iTunes and nearly 13 million for QuickTime. Combined, Apple was second to Microsoft. First noted by Macworld UK, the report says tht "iTunes is used over twice as long as its nearest rival RealPlayer (111 minutes versus 46.4 minutes per person, or 2.4 times as long) and that RealPlayer is the only other player surveyed to show growth in usage over the last three years. QuickTime and Windows Media Player are losing mindshare among users." iTunes should pass RealPlayer in mid-2006 at current growth rates and will be to second with just under 30 million unique users to Microsoft's Windows Media Player, which will have about 80 million unique users, according the data.
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Maybe the same might happen with browsers too but since the majority of people aren't geeky enough to care about their browsing experience (as opposed to music which almost everyone universally loves)...I'm not gonna bet on it.
I'd say 2 more years and Apple will have MS by the balls and the table will have turned.
Now, youv'e got to hand it to Apple for their stealth installation of Quicktime on all machines running iTunes.
All this media player stuff is too esoteric for regular folks. All they want is to be able to watch something play, period. They dont care whether its QT, WMP, Real, or whatever.
As long as Apple remains the swiss army knife of media, theres no way anyone else can keep up.
In any case, this is great news as the more people who have QuickTime installed, the more web sites that will hopefully support QuickTime formats so we don't have to install crappy RealPlayer and Flip4Mac products on our Macs.
There are people that care.
Or.. they're buying iPods which we already knew... and installing the iPod Software from the CD.. which installs iTunes and QuickTime and would lend to these numbers since it seems to be tracking number of unique users rather than downloads.
Untill there is a serious concentrated effort to help Windows users on a single web page ( not buried in Apple discussions ) .. then it will be a long time before Quicktime / iTunes will be mainstream.
Ha ha, you're funny - tell another one!