What Ever Happened to Apple Making FaceTime an ‘Open Industry Standard’?

Chris Adamson:

Make no doubt about it, Apple very clearly said they were going to do this. Steve Jobs himself said so at WWDC 2010, around 1:36:45 on the video:

Now FaceTime is based on a lot of open standards: H.264 video, AAC audio, and a bunch of alphabet soup acronyms. And we’re going to take it all away. We’re going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we’re going to make FaceTime an open industry standard.

“Starting tomorrow”? Nearly a year later, there’s no indication this process has started. [...]

For what it’s worth, the story I’ve heard is that the FaceTime team at Apple first heard about making it an open standard live during the WWDC keynote itself. So when Jobs said “starting tomorrow”, he meant it literally.

Wednesday, 11 May 2011