Apple Expands 3GPP Support with QuickTime 6.5

CUPERTINO, California—December 18, 2003—Apple® today announced QuickTime® 6.5, the industry’s first mainstream media architecture for the creation and playback of rich multimedia content for both CDMA 2000 and GSM wireless networks. Expanding its support for mobile multimedia standards to include both 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and 3rd Generation Partnership Project 2 (3GPP2), QuickTime 6.5 enables users to share high-quality video, audio and text across the two predominant wireless networking technologies worldwide. QuickTime 6.5 will add to the existing popularity of QuickTime 6, which has already had over 175 million downloads in less than 18 months since its release.

QuickTime 6.5 delivers extensive support for the 3GPP and 3GPP2 standards, including Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR) and Qualcomm Code Excited Linear Predictive (QCELP) audio codecs, MPEG-4 and H.263 video codecs, 3G Timed Text, native .3gp and .3g2 file formats as well as support for Movie Fragments, which provide mobile operators and content providers with the advantages of real-time streaming within their existing web infrastructure.

“QuickTime 6, with MPEG video and AAC audio, is by far the most popular version of QuickTime ever distributed, with over 175 million copies downloaded and counting,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “The new QuickTime 6.5 adds enhanced support for 3GPP and 3GPP2 mobile networks bringing state-of-the-art audio and video content to the latest wireless services.”

“Over 6.5 million KDDI and Okinawa Cellular customers can now use QuickTime 6.5 exclusively to create and play back ‘EZmovie’ content on their desktops taking advantage of both our popular AMC format and the 3GPP2 standard,” said Makoto Takahashi, vice president and general manager of KDDI’s Content Business Planning Department, Solution Business Sector. “We also recommend QuickTime 6.5 as a preferred tool for professional content creation for our 3G ‘CDMA 1x WIN’ and ‘CDMA 1x’ video streaming and video download service.”

Additional features of QuickTime 6.5 include cross-platform Unicode text support, enhanced DV playback, and performance improvements for iMovie®, iDVD™ and Final Cut Pro®. QuickTime 6.5 is available immediately as a free download for Mac® and Windows users at www.apple.com/quicktime.

QuickTime is Apple’s industry-leading, standards-based software for developing, producing and delivering high-quality audio and video over IP, wireless and broadband networks. As the platform of choice for content creators worldwide, QuickTime delivers the full media experience for thousands of unique software titles and enhanced music CDs. QuickTime was chosen by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as the base file format for MPEG-4 and is at the core of the 3GPP and 3GPP2 standards.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Apple is committed to bringing the best personal computing experience to students, educators, creative professionals and consumers around the world through its innovative hardware, software and Internet offerings.

Press Contacts:
Cameron Craig
Apple
(408) 974-6281
cam@apple.com

Stefan Offermann
Apple
(408) 974-6633
stefan@apple.com

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