QuickTime, developed by Apple Computer, is a popular format for streaming video and multimedia presentations encoded in various formats. The first version was released in December 1991, and Apple initially used QuickTime to provide video, graphics, and audio content on CD-ROMs. It remains the most popular format for CD-ROM video. In fact, Apple was fairly late in offering streaming capability for QuickTime, which was not made available until the release of Version 4 in June 1999--four years after the introduction of RealAudio.
The QuickTime is a ``container'' format that is particularly useful for synchronizing the content of numerous multimedia files, which may be stored in different locations. The process of editing a multimedia presentation in QuickTime is much simpler than in other formats, and because of this facility, MPEG adopted the QuickTime .mov format as the basis for MPEG-4 in 1998. In an odd twist, Apple held off on incorporating the resulting MPEG-4 standard into QuickTime following a dispute with the MPEG-4 license holders over licensing fees. The two parties reached a compromise, and QuickTime 6 was released in July 2002. As of this writing, the latest release is Version 7.0.3.