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NPR's Car Talk Dumping RealMedia
olcrazypete writes: "Click and Clack are apparently fed up with Real Networks. They have switched to Windows Media Player format. 'Why? Because, for a long time, we've had tons of complaints about RealNetworks. And the one that ticks us off the most is the perceived trickery they use to sell their premium products. This is just our opinion, mind you, but it's shared by enough of our listeners, that we
finally decided to take action.' The whole story is here . My favorite line: 'It stinks so much that it even makes Microsoft look good by comparison. That's something, huh?'"
I would like to write an open letter to the people of RealMedia, telling them how I disp *BUFFERING*
Setec Astronomy
Not that I would ever endorse anything from Apple, but their streaming media technology seems fairly competent.
Switch to something a little more open minded... like Nullsoft's Shoutcast. I listen to some pretty nice UK radio stations from across the pond with KDE's Noatun whilst I code thanks to Shoutcast. I don't see any reason why its not usable for radio broadcasts like Click & Clack.
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
For those who don't know already, both mplayer and xine play streaming windows media just fine on Linux/FreeBSD/etc.
Seriously though. These guys (Click and Clack) are Macheads so why not quicktime? The Quicktime streaming server fundamentals are under the Darwin open source and free paradigms, there are no licensing fees as there are with Windows, and hey, it's so easy to use. So, what gives?
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
There are really only two major players out there these days, Windows Media and Quicktime.
The main problem with Real is the server licenses. That and the really bad reputation their spyware gave the format.
Give people a choice of Windows Media and QuickTime, for video or audio, and you really can't go far wrong.
Flash video is looking really good these days too, although it's still early days for the Macromedia folks.
Peoples problem with Real Media is not the quality of the streaming media. It is the constant barrage of advertising and popups to get you to sign up for the premium service. Microsoft may no tdo this now but once they have the market cornered they will switch to a pay for play model i'm guessing. I'm surprised that Car talk is moving away from this kind of crap when so many others are moving toward. It seems like half the online newspapers that used to be free are now a charge or register type of thing.
I would like to salute the ashes of american flags, and all the fallen leaves filling up shopping bags.
I used to like Real. Even after the debacle with the spyware in their jukebox, I was willing to give them a second chance. But I learned my lesson somewhere around G2. I was installing their latest player on my wife's Windows box, and up pops a Gator installer!
:-P
Of course it also didn't help my opinion of them that they provided my state with Maria Cantwell.
#DeleteChrome
Back when Real Media was using the adult entertainment industry to get their hold on the streaming media market, they had a special link for adult websites that made it much more obvious how to download the free player. Of course back then finding the free player link from their main page wasn't so hard either.
Divx.com is guilty of the same thing. They have a free codec package that will work fine with Windows Media Player. But it isn't in their table of their three main products. Also if you do find it, and just go with the install default config options, you'll see a Divx watermark at the start of every video. This can be turned off easy enough from the "Decoder Configuration Utility".
It's about...buffering.......time someone....buffering..buffering...realized realmedia sucks...buffering...for everything.
It's free isn't it? It definitely sucks less than Windows Media.
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I can't say that I blame them. I haven't had RealPlayer on any of my PCs for ages. I went to fetch the most recent incarnation a few days ago and was completely blown away that what ought to be a relatively simple audio/video streaming client had grown to be more than 14MB.
As much as it doesn't sit well with me, Media Player is included with Windows. It requires no downloads, it doesn't bombard me with ads, and it seems to work pretty well.
Here's the main reason they likely decided to use Windows Media instead of "free" alternatives or Quicktime: The people at Car Talk want to make it easy for their listeners to tune in. They know that the majority of PCs in the world already have the Windows Media Player sitting there on the desktop waiting to be clicked, or the plugin already tied to Internet Explorer.
The transition will therefore be as seamless as possible for the listeners -- a simple matter of "click here" and the program will play. No messing around with downloading new clients, configuring, or what have you.
Whether you (open source booster) think this is right or wrong is another matter entirely.
This is offtopic I know but NPR leftest?
I'm a Conservative/Moderate and I listen to NPR, I feel that their news is the best and least biased around because they are non-profit, they don't have to worry about keeping one side or the other happy.
The best thing about NPR is that they don't try to hype news to get me to listen. Cable news makes me sick with the way they twist the truth in teasers to get you to tune in to whatever is next by playing with your emotions. NPR treats me like an intellegent person and lets me decide for myself. I don't always agree with them but I never feel like they are trying to get me to either.
The Anti-Blog
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm an insane right wing gun nut and I listen to NPR because the profit driven stations in my area (Seattle) mostly suck ass. Yeah, profit motivated stations are soooooooo great, look at the quality of fare offered by Clear Channel.
I'm disappointed that they don't use Shoutcast/MP3 or Quicktime, although Quicktime might piss them off for the same reason as Real Media does as every time you start it Apple ends up trying to get you to shell out some dineros for Quicktime Pro.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
And for that matter, to be fair to Real, the the Helix server/player/tools are also Open/Free (both Speech and Beer).
That doesn't really address the 'free Real player is harder to find than Osama Bin Laden at night' comment... Real's own employees have bitched about that for years, God knows the rest of us have. Hopefully that gives the Open movement within Real (the Helix Community) a little more leverage in selling their case to the more hardline business folk still trying to figure out why their user base is evaporating.
OTOH, I'm a bit pissed off... I have a free Real player (with all the source) that works great. Thanks Click and Clack, I can't listen to your program anymore. That 'free' windows player comes with a $200 Windows tax attached.
Nothing like a damned fool 'statement' that flies in the face of common sense.
Monty
I used to be an engineer at Real. Most of us got fired a couple years ago. I think the programming is done out of India, or one of those former soviet republics.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Go here to get Real Alternative.
a ti ve.htm
It plays Real Audio crap without the need for Real's crapware.
Windows only, I do believe.
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Real_Altern
no they did not. they are still playing games.
1 2904realhome_1_3_2_1_1_1
go to http://www.real.com/.
the headline reads: Introducing RealPlayer 10
subheadline: New Powerful Free
with a big image with a big, bright "Free" logo.
click on the free logo takes you here:
http://www.real.com/realplayer.html?pp=home&src=0
there are two big "Download Now" buttons on this site. both lead to the non-free premium player. in the margin on the right, with grey text over a grey background, there is a link to the free player.
that is bullshit. i know the free player is there, and that real plays tricks, so i specifically look for it. the average internet user, on the other hand, may not be that aware.
real are still assholes, and i am glad cartalk is moving away from their format because of their shitty tactics.
To me file types are like a langauge. They should be free and open. Could you imagine the mess we'd be in if we had to pay a fee to use the english language. Or if someone kept it hidden so that it could only be used with their translators. For the man that could patent it, it would be a gold mine.
Sure, the windows player has a $200 Windows tax. And a $200-$4000 PC tax ('cause hey, the files don't do much good if you don't have a PC), and even Linux comes with this tax.
Got a Mac? Guess there's an OSX tax there, along with the inflated hardware tax.
On Linux, you can use MPlayer to play wma files. Completely free. Except for the PC tax.
For some reason, your post reminded me of this.
Hope you don't mind the PC tax required to view that strip....
Car Talk's technical advisor, Meg Ahertz said that the RealMedia is complete bogosity. "I tried to reason with their VP, Hugh Jass, but he redirected me to their lawyers, Dewey, Cheatham and Howe." At that point, I turned the matter over to our staff mediators, Sue First and Bernadette Bridge. The rest is history.
And it's the best show on NPR, bar none. They started offering this a month or two back, and the next week had a sample from their deluge of "thank you" letters.
Click and Clack probably haven't noticed this -- busy, as they always are, laughing at their own jokes.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
Not only is NPR rather balanced (I personally used to listen to it every day in the car when I lived outside of the city), but people who listen to NPR as their main source of information have been shown to have less misconceptions about the war in Iraq than people who listen to or watch other news sources.
Interestingly enough, the study found that people who watched Fox News had the most misconceptions.
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
"First you have to hunt down the link for the free player, similiar to what winamp's doing now... "
Honestly now, if you couldn't find this link in under 30 seconds after visiting their page, you're either blind, braindead or just plain stupid. Maybe even all three. Finding winamp's free download is not even remotely close to slogging through Real website.
Yes, way to rate those topics, mods.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
RealAudio was founded by a former Microsoft exec. Rumor is that he was too scumy for Microsoft.
I actually posted a comment to this effect in another thread (and got modded to -1 for some reason, oh well). Why NOT Ogg? It's free for them, free for me, and works under every OS. If they think M$ is good, then Ogg is 100 times better, IMO. Then again, maybe they don't want people saving the stream or something?
Oh well, enough of Car Talk, I guess. At least RealPlayer worked... I can't get it to work in MPlayer OR gxine. Anyone have some pointers?
My other car is first.
Actually, they're both pretty smart.
Tom Bio
Ray's Bio
Tom had scholarships to both MIT and Harvard, worked as an engineer, got an MBA, earned a PhD, taught for several years as a professor, taught international business abroad, started his own do-it-yourself auto repair shop (very hacker like), and has a successful auto repair show. Oh, and Ray, the "stupid" one, went to MIT too.
Also, if you listen to their show, every week they have a math problem for their listeners to solve. The show is great. They're both pretty funny and the show is surprisingly entertaining. Who said gearheads are stupid?
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
Bah, why confuse things with facts?
Seriously, though, do you expect them to back up a joke like that with notes on all of microsoft's wrongdoings?
We host the local NPR station using ffmpeg and everyone's been quite happy with it. When they initially consulted with us I recommended against RealPlayer for exactly the reasons stated in the summary.
The only 'problem' I have with ffmpeg is that it's been using 100% cpu on one of the processors. But since it's a dual-processor server that we are no longer using for anything major other than the streaming, it hasn't been a big enough issue to figure out why it's doing it.
But one person finds this reply useful, I'll be happy. :)
There exists an alternative to downloading the horrid Real Player. Try googling "Real Alternative". It is a freely available codec that can work with any standard media player (such as Media Player Classic). Infact, I think it comes bundled with MPC. As far as I know, it works well.
I have done the same thing with Gallery, having people that use the printing services donate to the project. Is it that big of a mystery that when you treat customers right they do pay you back and keep you going? Besides, it helps cut down on your PR costs.
Why is it that when someone has an opinion that is more than one step short of outright facism in this country...blah blah blah
Hyperbolize much?
You can always grab the radio signal from the ether and encode it to MP3 or whatever on your own. Here are a couple of pages on how to do this: #1, #2.
Some choice quotes:
Because they sell archives through Audible. Using a streaming format with DRM at least provides some ass-coverage against redistribution. Remember, Car Talk is not free-as-in-beer. Your local NPR affiliate pays a hefty chunk of change for Car Talk, All Things Considered, and other radio shows you all take for granted.
But no: "Cannot find codec for audio format 0xA" and mplayer bails. Many hours of googling, trolling mplayer-dev/user and all I can come up with is:
I've got MPlayer 1.0pre3, and /usr/lib/win32/wma9dmod.dll (along with the rest of the "essential.tar.bz2" codecs) from the mplayer web site.
If someone has *actually* listened to a wma CarTalk feed and can tell me where to find the magic codec I will be a very happy camper. I will even accept a necessary minimum of abuse for not finding the solution on my own.
Most people are easy marks when they are dealing with an unfamiliar subject. If your doctor prescribes a drug for your condition, what will you do if you are not a doctor yourself? Buy it and become an "easy mark", or refuse and potentially die? I think I know a most common answer to that.
I've never been satisfied with Quicktime or RealAudio and never realy have had problems with WM player.
Thats the way it is and I believe M$ should have been broken up so that 3rd party apps at least have a chance to be competative.
As it is right now, 3rd party apps targetted by Microsoft simply cannot compete and make money and I don't have time in my life to wrestle with products continously being sabatoged by MS, crippled ware or little used variants.
You won't find the older players by navigating their website, you just have to know the link http://forms.real.com/real/player/blackjack.html
What was the last law that benefited people but not corporations?
Reminds me of this:
From The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, by Douglas Adams.
On linux, there's the open-source HelixPlayer project, which has recently had a Milestone 2 preview release.
Check out Helix Player
Rather than celebrate another format win by Microsoft, complain! Put up a stink.
In the meantime, if you don't like the way the RealPlayer currently works, help us with the Helix Player, which is an open source player that commercial Linux desktop providers don't have to worry about getting sued for distributing.
If you don't like the fact that RealAudio and RealVideo are still proprietary formats, then help us support Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora, as well as any other free codecs that are applicable. But whatever you do, don't just let Microsoft win these battles.
Rob Lanphier
Helix Troublemaker
RealNetworks
I'm not going to be an apologist for RealNetworks past actions. RealNetworks is a big enough company, that Jamie Zawinski's quote "[G]reat things are accomplished by small groups of people who are driven, who have unity of purpose. The more people involved, the slower and stupider their union is." I'll admit we've done slow and stupid things. However, there are certain things that can only be done by big companies, no matter how slow and stupid, which is why I haven't written a similar rant.
However, I'd like to point out that, in the "slow and stupid" vein, we're slowly getting better. The RealPlayer 10 beta isn't perfect, but it's better, and I imagine that things will be better in the final release.
Moreover, we've got a lot of really great things going on in the Helix Community. We've got the Helix Player for Linux, which just the won Best Open Source Project award at LinuxWorld. That means that if there's something that annoys you about it, you can fix it. It's based on Gtk, and the engine code is all cross-platform, so someone could theoretically port it to Windows even.
So, we're trying. I'm hoping that folks could cut us a little slack. I'm hoping that the Linux folks out there could help us change Car Talk's mind, since Windows Media is a pretty Linux-hostile format.
Thanks
Rob Lanphier
Helix Troublemaker
RealNetworks
As others have mentioned in this thread, the core technologies behind RealNetwork's client, server, and producer projects have been released as an open source known as Helix. Details are available at helixcommunity.org
There is a faq on the project here
The Real codecs cannot be open sourced as explained here, but a variety of open source codecs and network transports are available in open source form, including ogg vorbis and smil.
The client core itself is fairly light weight, and currently runs on memory-constrained embedded devices like Nokia's series 60 cellphones
The client apps project contains a very basic player built on the core. The linux-based HelixPlayer project offers a more advanced player, though this player is still in development stages
Check out Helix Player
One defense I will offer for our hardline business folks is that they've figured out how to keep the lights on. The fact of the matter is, we just announced that consumer revenue was 76% of our 2003q4 revenue, up from 70% the previous quarter. "Consumer revenue" is made up of subscriptions to our premium business, as opposed to systems revenue selling media servers. People assume that our business is still about media servers. So, they do get a little zealous about keeping the subscription business growing.
The thing that can't be repeated enough is that RealAudio is a supported format on Linux. Now, Linux users are forced to use jury-rigged solutions to listen to Car Talk. Very sad.
Rob Lanphier
Helix Troublemaker
RealNetworks
All you people complaining "I don't see the problem" and bashing the reference to the "average internet user";
In my experience the "average user" notices all the extra icons throughout the average users choice of OS. -Including resource draining (everybody does not own a uber-computer) entries into the start-up group. They never seem to enjoy having their PC's turned into billboards. What's the other one I always find right there with it? It seems both are seen as "crappy" but necessary by the average Joe. So, it still sucks, even if you're fine with their pushy web page. You don't see attitudes like this with Winamp or many of the others.
Quicktime tries the "start-up" registry entry every time you run it! At least Real Player stopped doing that.
I enjoy the look on peoples faces when these junk apps are removed and their PC is running "like it used to".
Naive as it is to say, I'm just disappointed anything on NPR would be associated with Real, being they have such a low-brow sales strategy. I am waiting for "This American Life" (http://thislife.org/) to realize Real does not reflect well upon them either.
I have one customer who uses AutoCAD and therefore (until recently, anyway) MS-Windows. Machine A, running MS-Windows 98, plots fine. Machine B, running MS-Windows 98 (and the same versions of everything) refuses to plot to the same (LAN-connected) plotter.
AutoDesk advise upgrading to Windows ME, so B is duly upgraded, and fails, and is wiped and reinstalled, and works. Hurrah! Both machines can plot.
Management now decides to shoot for homogeneity, so upgrades to ME on A as well... and it stops plotting. Wipe and reinstall doesn't help. Wipe and revert to 98 does.
Exit one technician, stage left, screaming.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Well, the web site I could live with, seein' as you can eventually find the free link. Waste of time and lame, yes, but still... it's a one time affair.
What really got my goat when I could last be arsed to try RealOne, though, was that it was the worst annoy-ware ever. None of the obvious options seemed to convince it that
1. no, I do _not_ want it to keep pre-loading itself, and
2. no, I don't want to be spammed with their lame pop-ups... even when I'm not even watching and realmedia files any more, and have manually removed all file associations to it
It was _not_ convincing me to fork over the dough for the premium version. Au contraire, it just served to convince me that I _don't_ want to "vote with the wallet" that such lame practices continue.
Now mind you, this was some two versions back, so I don't know if they fixed it or not in the meantime. But still, it's left such a bitter taste in my mouth, that I don't want to have anything to do with them again. Ever.
And just for the sake of having a good rant, what the **** is with all these business models based on annoying the potential customer? I can understand that they need money, but then don't bloody advertise it as "FREE!!!"
The whole thing is as if I advertised "FREE MP3 players!" Only once you've got one, I started showing up at your house, reading your diary, making a list of what music you're playing, listening to your phone conversations (the non-Internet equivalent of what spyware does to a TCP/IP connection), and shouting in front of your window to give me money if you want me to shut up. Even when you're not actually using that MP3 player.
Surely noone would put up with that kind of a trick, for a non-computer product. But in the software world it's become accepted and expected that, hey, the user is a computer-illiterate anyway. You're _expected_ to sell him/her snake oil, rape his/her privacy as hard as you can, never test or debug the product first, and generally be as annoying or dishonest as possible if it makes you money. etc. How did this happen?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I have to disagree. It's not because Quicktime on anything other than the Mac eats ass, it's because Quicktime just plain eats ass.
.avi and .wmv files are much, much more common than .mov files.
At one point, up until the final version 2 release (I believe 2.5.x), QuickTime was a pretty solid software suite. The player had an extremely compact GUI, a good featureset for the time, and was stable. It wasn't commercial, and didn't constantly beg for money. It even had MIDI support.
Then came the dark, dark days of version 3. At some point, presumably buoyed by the fact that their System 7.5+ CD player interface had used a custom WDEF and other widgets, some "UI designer" on the Apple media team was given free rein. As far as I can guess, said designer was from the hardware team, because that was the beginning of The Great Apple Interface Starting To Suck. QuickTime 3 had nonstandard widgets, and used an ugly, less functional brushed metal interface. Version 4 was worse, and the downward trend continued. QuickTime eventually required idiotic contortions to get the controls to work ("He he...knobs are cool, and all those amateur WinAMP skinners do them -- we should add a volume knob!") I don't even need to mention the ridiculous idea of the Favorites drawer. The Windows interface was truly appalling. For a company that is clearly capable (or at least once was) of designing Very Good Interfaces and got violently pissy about Microsoft producing poor UIs on their Mac releases (think Word 6), Apple did a stupendously poor job of implementing their Windows media player client. There was little excuse for the floating menu bar other than pure arrogance -- simply refusing to recognize another platform's interface standards. At first, they could get away with this, because Microsoft's own Video for Windows blew chunks. However, Microsoft steadily improved, and Apple managed to convince itself that nobody could ever challenge QuickTime dominance.
Now, QuickTime is reduced to extremely annoying nagware/shareware with an interface that has only marginally improved since the Bad Days after version 2.x. Aside from Apple-hosted movie trailers, most end users don't run into it a heck of a lot. This is, for once, absolutely not an area where Apple lost due to Microsoft playing dirty. Apple lost because Apple did a poor job of serving users. Now,
(I'd also like to repeat my personal irritation with Apple actively pulling another QuickTime with its insistance on the single mouse button. Once again, they have people at the company who are arrogant enough to think that they can dictate to the user what the user will use and can ignore user complaints. They've still refused to accept the fact that they can do this only in the short run.)
It may just be because Apple is a big company, and big companies tend to do this, but it seems like Apple tries overly hard to leverage anything it produces ("this is really nice, but you have to use it on *our* terms"), and ends up killing it off. The few really impressive, new things that Apple has produced that haven't been leveraged to death seem to be suffering abandonment -- Speech Manager development sure isn't what it used to be, and OpenDoc got put into maintenance mode.
The last time I can remember Apple listening to popular demand was with standardizing windoids, and they took forever to do so, waiting until everyone else was using them. If poor reliability is Microsoft's Achilles' heel, arrogance is Apple's. (And disinterest in implementing boring features and maintaining backwards compatibility Linux's -- only on Linux does one hear "hey, we're doing a new minor kernel release soon -- let's require every vendor with a USB device driver to rewrite it!".)
May we never see th
Slashdot is not a research facility, it's not a debtate, it's an informal discussion, and you can't come in and demand that people involved in the discussion be less biased - accept that this is the tone of the group, and if you want to, join in.
No one's forcing you to read....
content management for designers
If what they say is true why aren't they just using an MP3 stream? that works everywhere. Could it be this has something to do with their hosting company being a big Windows 2000 server farm?
I was just thinking the same thing. Winamp Shoutcast (although a little funny) or IceCast would work great. I have been playing with this stuff myself (check my homepage -err rather don't my little box can't handle more that a few streams) and the standard MP3/M3U combo works great. Am I missing something? Or are these people just not "with it" and have to spend money and go with a propriatary system. I have not used one of these streaming media packages but my fooling around with pure audio is great. Every damn player I have used can deal with good ol MPEG audio and I have messed with streaming MPEG video. MPEG1 at 336 is just about as good/ little better that news.com's Windows Media at 220 plus it plays everywhere and best of all, Bill isn't involved.
Can someone enlighten me please... I have been trying to figure this out and I just don't get it.
I'm trying to understand the licensing of NPR programs. I've written NPR several times regarding the NOVA series and they never get past the standard reply to my questions.
;);)
I would have naively thought that publicly funded t.v. would be, if not free, at least publically available... but it's not. Only a select few NOVA episodes are available for puchase, much less those free on the web.
I have been waiting for years for the day that I can sit down and watch all those *good* old NOVA episodes that I missed over the years... (tired of this "let's reconstruct a pyramid" crap).
They responded to my query once telling me that, basically, it's expensive to stream video over the web... which is not really true...
At the very minimum, it should be possible to get access to any publicly funded program at some reasonable media cost...
Perhaps I can FOIA them
Pat
The weekend NPR show On The Media recently added a free mp3 format download of their show. I think many npr shows are reluctant to do this because they have an alternative income source by selling mp3s at audible.com.
Perhaps the recent significant contribution to npr by the McDonald's widow, and president Bush's new found appreciation for the NEA, has loosened the noose a little.
You can find mp3 streams of various npr affiliates via shoutcast.com, but I think we would all love to have a national stream, and individual shows in an open format.
The only way to get this is to A) Pledge, and B) Suggest it.
It would also be nice to download official Nova episodes in an open format.
And NO, I am not going to suggest they use Ogg - yes, it would be free, MP3s not, but I'm trying to stay on-point that WMA is bad, not muddy the issue with a format that Click and Clack may never have heard of, and certainly a large portion of their audience has not heard of.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Except it is illegal to use the wma codecs unless you have a paid copy of windows. So ya I can listen to car talk with linux, but that means the FBI will probably be beating down my door.
http://www.windmeadow.com/
Microsoft gives away the Windows Media server. You as a content distributor can serve up as many Windows Media streams as you want, no charge. Microsoft develops state-of-the-art codecs and integrates them into a platform that is literally a no-brainer to install and use. Windows Media is a loss leader for Microsoft that makes it a lot easier for them to sell servers.
.mp3, have begun to try to collect royalties from the authors of all the various implementations of .mp3 technology.
.mp3 standard is 14 years old now, which accounts for the 50% bitrate penalty you pay vis-a-vis Windows Media for comparable performance.
a te/licensing.aspx . In general, they're considerably lower than MPEG's.)
Despite widespread popular belief, MPEG technology is not free; there are many components of various MPEG standards that are patented. Typically, in exchange for a license to implement an MPEG standard, a manufacturer pays royalties to the patentholders, which it typically recovers in the price paid by the consumer. In the last few years Thomson and Fraunhofer-Institut, the main holders of patents relative to
For more details check out http://mp3licensing.com/ (for audio) or http://mpegla.com/ (for video and systems like your cable modem - yes, your cable modem tunnels IP over MPEG-2). In general, MPEG royalties are not what little guys like you and I would think of as "cheap".
Moreover, MPEG, being an international standards body, moves with all the blazing speed of diplomacy. The
(To be thorough here, Microsoft also charges royalties to third-party developers who implement Windows Media. You can read all about them at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/cre
Real's situation is more difficult than in that licensing the streaming technology is its primary source of income - which in general is not true of Microsoft, the MPEG patentholders, or the various businesses associated with Quicktime streaming. Consequently, RNWK tries to hit up everyone it can find for as much money as possible. This is not only distasteful to the consumer, but also to the streamcaster whose largest single operating expenditure is license fees to RNWK.
There's nothing really wrong with RNWK's technology, except maybe that they don't have the cash flow to spend on codec development that Microsoft or Apple does. They've done well just to stay in business this long, given the market they're in and the competition they've taken on.
As if 1 out of 100 people outside tech even know what slashdot is. Don't give it too much credit...
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy