RealNetworks’ RealPlayer 10:
When Rob Glaser’s RealNetworks’ RealPlayer first hit CyberSpace as the first software to play audio online, it really was an event.
That was in 1995 and a couple of years later, it added RealVideo. Then Glaser went for the Big Time with the Big Five and RealNetworks entered into a joint venture with AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann and EMI Group.
Thus was MusicNet born. RealNetworks became RealOne Music and in an amazing coincidence, was the first service to license content from the service.
However, MusicNet was, and still is, an appalling dud.
In the meanwhile, “The rate of innovation [in the film and video industry] is not what is needed to avoid the Napsterization the music industry went through,” Glaser said at the Consumer Electronics Show.
Enter the RealRhapsody online music store, built into RealPlayer 10, beta (RealOne as was) and in effect RealNetworks’ bid to join the online music corporate crowd.
“RealNetworks’ multimedia-playback program … is both widely used and widely despised,” says Rob Pegoraro in his Washington Post review here.
The, “extensive use of RealAudio and RealVideo formats in online broadcasting makes the player software unavoidable, but the company’s relentless use of it to sell unrelated services and features has made this program little better than spyware in many users’ eyes.
“In some ways, the new RealPlayer 10 is the worst of all of Real’s releases – after years of complaints about the same problems, the company made only token efforts to address them. And the program’s major new feature, an online music store, is an appalling mess.”
However, “The point of putting up with all this nonsense is to enjoy a wide variety of music and video webcasts and files. This is RealPlayer’s strongest advantage: It plays almost every format you’re likely to encounter online or on your hard drive, including MP3, AAC, QuickTime and Windows Media,” adds the story.
“RealPlayer 10 can even play songs bought off such online stores as iTunes and Napster – although iTunes songs are identified in RealPlayer only by file names, leaving out the usual artist, album and title data. (A Real spokesman said this would be fixed in the final version.)”
So there you go.
