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Real Sues Baseball Over Windows Media
westlake writes 'According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, RealNetworks has sued Major League Baseball over its use of Windows Media. The dispute began with MLB's decision to stream exhibition games in WMA format only, under its revised contract, Real claims all live MLB streams must include RealMedia as an option. The piece states: 'Windows Media Player controlled about 34 percent of the U.S. market, compared with nearly 19 percent for RealOne player and 10 percent for QuickTime player, according to January data from Nielsen/NetRatings.'"
I hope Real wins, Major League Baseball sticks by the terms of the contract they signed, and Microsoft has to start dealing with competition.
But on the other hand, if all three parties got wiped out by a freak comet impact, I'd be even happier!
Just imagine it: Major Leaguers with bats chasing down lawyers. GTA only with not so innocent civilians...
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
They're just being proactive instead of waiting for Microsoft to "innovate" them off the map.
I'd love to see them die instead of saying their innovating...
I take it MLB didn't get "Expressed Written Consent" for that.
Karma: 0xdeadbeef(mostly as a result of being newly allocated)
We all know that baseball fans just love the superior xvid format as well as mplayer. Besides, compiling gentoo gives them something interresting to watch during the game.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
The other 37% is people clicking through pop-ups, getting notifications that another version of Real is available, and trying to figure out how to un-install Real player.
PLAINTIFF, Real Networks, Inc. hereby does... ::Buffering...::Buffering...::
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
Real Player: Free as in syphilis.
I have prepared a response, I believe that (buffering, buffering, buffering) the case has no (buffering, buffering, buffering) ahh the hell with it.
I hate sigs.
No, real baseball doesn't start until the post season :-) During the regular season, it's called "hanging out in a giant beer garden and enjoying the weather"
What?
Um, ogg of course! Don't you know everyone uses ogg? Every wednesday night we get together and make fun of wma users for their lossy drm'ed spyware.
If everyone followed Real's business strategy, Coke would be sueing many restaurants for not being offered alongside Pepsi.
Please note that Real is not asking MLB to only broadcast in Real, as the article stated, "MLB is free to use Microsoft's Windows Media format if it wants, but under the Feb. 8 agreement, it also must use RealNetworks' RealMedia format to provide live coverage of the entire baseball season, including spring training."
What's the problem? MLB could follow Real's footsteps in guiding the user to the preferred format. To find a web link to a Real stream, you have to click through a procession of fourteen different links, including three white-on-white-text links and one link cleverly covered by a flash animation.
I am not a sig.
Yes, I hear there's big money in streaming pre-season baseball games over the internet. the ad-sales alone are probably worth dozens of dollars! dozens!
They can't win in the marketplace by using their spyware tactics or actually creating a quality product, so now they're trying to remove the ability for businesses to choose any technology other than RealMedia. The obvious desperation here is sickly comic.
I think we should load SCO, Real, and George W on board a European mars probe and launch it, with specific instructions to crash-land on Mars and never be heard from again... after all, Bush wants to go to Mars; SCO could finally find fossil evidence to support their claim that their propriety UNIX code is the basis for all life; and Real could start streaming video to outer space, instead of to us here on Earth.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.