p2pnet.net News:- RealNetworks is going flat out to gain acceptance - and market share.

With wide non-excitment about his company’s unreal music store, Real boss Ron Glaser recently launched an Apple buster application called Harmony and in a loss-lead, limited-time sale, slashed download prices by a virtual 50%.

Real says it’s sold more than a million songs since temporarily lopping 40 cents off the normal 99 cent charge and now, “The Seattle-based company said Monday that it had struck deals with the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Minnesota system to offer its standard Rhapsody service to students for between $2 US and $3 US a month,” says an Associated Press story here.

“The service, which normally costs $9.95 a month US, allows users to play more than 700,000 songs on demand. Subscribers also can burn songs onto a CD for 79 cents apiece.”

A while back Glaser said not all device makers are adopting Real’s Helix architecture and that, “A balkanization morass is growing”. Accordingly, he announced four ‘challenges’ for his company - and the digital media industry at large.

1 - Get the film and video industry off its feet;
2 - Continue to drive digital media into the mainstream;
3 - Make it easier to deploy digital media services; and,
4 - Ensure devices, music stores, and rights management systems interoperate.

In January, Real announced the recipients of the ‘2003 Helix Community Grant Program’ and the “breadth of proposals funded illustrates the excitement behind the Helix Community” said a puff release.

Among those blessed was the Computer Science Department at University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB.

“RealNetworks is working with UCSB to extend the multicast functionality in Helix to include recent advances in multicast technology. In addition to program funding and an appointed Helix advisor, students working on the UCSB project under Dr. Kevin Almeroth will receive academic credit for their Helix research and innovation.”

The University of Minnesota has RealNetworks tied directly into its online teaching program. For example, audio for ‘Screening of a Charged Particle by Mutivalent Counterions in Salty Water: Giant Charge Inversion’ (Dr Boris Shklovskii, ITP & University of Minnesota) calls for “RealPlayer or RealAudio by RealNetworks”.

With the Big Four record label cartel already firmly entrenched in other US universities, it won’t be long before parents have to fork out for hard-core commercial music services as part of the school fees.

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