How Apple lost it's Web Video mojo, and how it could get it back

Clayton Christensen is warning Apple against repeating old mistakes, but they have made different mistakes in video before.
Between my accepting a job on QuickTime at Apple in 1997, and my visa coming through in April 1998, Apple launched QuickTime 3.
The long awaited fully cross-platform version, it brought full editability and extensible video playback to Windows, and was abstracted enough to run on other platforms (it had been demoed on Irix, Linux and Solaris - this underlying Mac OS compatibility layer is what became Carbon).
At the time QuickTime was installed on over 60% of Windows machines, Apple had won the Canyon lawsuit against Microsoft and Intel, and the new version was really good, bringing the full power of video editing by reference all those platforms.

So how did they fuck up?

They invented pop-up web ads, and put one in before playing any web QT movie to sell the 'Pro' version of the player. They crippled the QT Player to remove the editing features unless you paid - even for the Mac users who had had the benefit before.

Their Windows installed base sank like a stone. Independent developers who were out getting QT installed on millions of Windows PCs stopped using it, as the pop-up ad would inevitably ruin their pitch demos, and corporations would not let it be installed. Not being party to the internal debate on this, I don't know who to blame for this debacle, but the hard drive of the machine I got when joining the QT Engineering team was called 'Fuck Phil Schiller'.

By hiding their biggest differentiator - editability - from users, Apple ceded the battle for web audio and video formats (the distraction of Streaming didn't help either). When widespread audio and video sharing happened, MP3 won for audio and the bizarre MPEG-4 in AVI hack that was DiVX won for video, because they were simple, non-streaming files.

When Apple added MP3 and MPEG4 support, they again had the chance to win users back, but they didn't make QT play back MPEG4 in AVI, despite being the default AVI player, and having all the needed codecs. This gave people another huge incentive to switch.

Eventually, though, Apple realised that local storage beats streaming, and came up with iPod and iTunes to ride the MP3 wave. They got their file format adopted by MPEG4 and did a great job of licensing and implementing MPEG4 codecs.

With the iPod Video, they have the chance to reclaim this ground. The no-config encoding of H264 looks very good, and they could reclaim the de facto format as .mp4 or .m4v. They picked up on Podcasting, and let anyone, even my sons, get into their directory.

If they don't make more DRM mistakes, and enable users to share audio and video playlists based on what they have played, they could retake the initiative.

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