Sprint has agreed to deliver video to its phones using Apple's QuickTime video technology. Sprint's PCS Vision Multimedia Services will deliver clips, including 'Sprint TV', to the Samsung MM-A700 handset. It's a minor announcement in the larger industry context, but a major deal for Apple, which can boast of its first carrier customer. So far, Real Networks has made most of the running in the mobile space, delivering news and sports clips for AT&T's new EDGE network through the Nokia 6620. The Real Player comes standard with Nokia's own Series 60 smartphones.

It's a double win for Apple, as Sprint has also nominated its Xserve G5 racks as back-end infrastructure to host QuickTime Streaming Server. Two and a half years ago Apple put into place a partnership with Sun to host the infrastructure on SPARC. Now Apple doesn't need Sun anymore, at least for the streaming part of the proposition.

QuickTime was one of very few technologies regarded strategic enough to survive the R&D cull when Steve Jobs regained control of Apple in 1997. QuickTime has supported the phone world's small-size 3GPP file format since version 6.0. ®

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