The Sad State of Streaming Video on the Mac

The Internet is getting less and less friendly to Mac users who want to watch live streaming video. It's something that's been bugging me more over the past year, but I've kind of learned to accept it at this point, simply being grateful that Flip4Mac was able to handle some newer Windows Media files and that YouTube and Google Video are in a platform-agnostic flash-based video format.

The danger of this state of affairs didn't really occur to me until I got an e-mail from a new MacBook Pro owner and former Windows user. He said he was completely pleased with the Apple laptop except

I'm used to the seamless way my old Windows laptop could play streaming media files, specifically WMV. When I try to play any WMV files embedded in Safari, it gives me an error message, then says "Windows Media Player might be able to play this file." So I click OK and WMP for Mac opens in its own window, buffers forever, then finally spews out the clip in what seems like
vastly inferior quality to what I'm used to on my five year old PC (is that a WMP 9 issue? I know Windows doesn't support WMP for Mac anymore). Having to click an error message each an every time you want to play a clip is a real nuisance, and the grainy, low-res quality of the playback only makes it worse.

What disturbs me is that his experience is actually better than mine has been with Windows Media lately. I can play just about any downloaded WMV file these days, but embedded video has just been one disaster after another. Flip4Mac is now smart enough to launch Quicktime externally when an embedded WMV file is detected, but it's anyone's guess whether it will play correctly or not.

Worse still, Windows Media Player's installer crashes every time I run it, so a work-around I discovered at a Mac-run blog about The Office has not proven effective.

I did get ASFRecorder up and running the other night, but it's an arcane tool. It doesn't play well with Microsoft's MMS server protocol, either.

Not to mention, I don't want to record the streams, I just want to watch them, especially live. There are a total of five more days of NCAA Tournament action at the March Madness on Demand site, and I'm not seeing any of it. I've tried user-agent spoofing, manually entering game URLs, everything, and Mac users are just locked out.

It's idiotic that I can pay $2 to buy a 10-minutes-or-less highlight version of any NCAA tournament game on iTunes, but I can't watch the games as they're happening for free on my computer. Apple could strike a deal to make money off the tournament but not to win support for their millions of users?

I would love to see any solutions you've come up with, if you've found one. Send them this way.

It's pretty unconscionable to me that Apple has let this happen. Even two years ago, Quicktime, Windows Media and RealOne Player were on roughly even footing for content delivery. Now, at least for live-streaming, Windows Media is the only game in town, while Apple is dominant in music and video download sales.

Yes, Microsoft is probably deliberately doing their best to make Mac users second-class citizens on the Web. That's what they're supposed to do. It's their job. Just as it's Apple's to make Mac users – especially the newest ones attracted by the Intel machines – feel like first-class citizens.

At the moment, we're on the outside looking in. Apple needs to integrate WMV support in Quicktime and keep it current. People aren't going to stay happy with this for long.