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Real Begs Apple for Alliance
hype7 writes "In a an extremely forward move, CEO of Real Networks Rob Glaser has emailed Steve Jobs, imploring him to open up Apple's AAC Digital Rights Management System - FairPlay - to Real. The upside for Real - all music sold by them would be compatible with the iPod. The upside for Apple - Real would make the iPod its primary device for the RealNetworks store and for the RealPlayer software. However, Mr. Glaser wasn't just dangling carrots - he implied that should Apple not be a receptive partner for an alliance, he would be forced to look towards Microsoft. There was a similar post made not too long ago, with BusinessWeek's take on the whole thing." There's a Reuters story as well.
Compare Real... The free player, while no longer buried as deep as it used to be, is still behind a text link in a grey box next to the big, shiny Premium Download button. Upon download, you're innundated with a page featuring "Real Accessories", which are little more than sponsored links to unrelated software.
Real is going to have a tough time of convincing Jobs that Apple really wants to associate with them...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
That's not "easily", and ogg support is crippled.
It's not hedging either -- AAC/MP4 is far more popular than ogg. Outside of a few vocal slashdot posters, nobody cares about ogg.
...RealOne Player 9 for Mac OS X actually includes none of the ads and crap that plague the Windows version. Like, at all. No popups, no shit ads, nothing. Just a player. As it should be.
Actually, with Winamp (all versions, including free), you can even listen to iTMS' DRM'ed AAC tracks with a simple plug-in.
Hell, you can even listen to Real's audio tracks without even having to install anything, if you want.
If they don't want to open up their propietary DRM'ed formats, open them up for them.
Air America and RealNetworks are allied on political lines. Maria Cantwell, one of Real's founders, is a prominent Democrat. I have it on good authority that Air America pays absolutely zero dollars for its so-called "webcasting" software.
I'm not Seth Finkelstein. I still speak the truth.
Actually, you can upgrade to a superdrive: http://www.mcetech.com/dvdr8xdt-d.html
Find me in ~/.sig
You exaggerate massively, in fact. No USB devices work without a third-party driver, but all firewire cams work. I use iChat AV via a JVC camcorder, for example.
Cheers,
Ian
...that you can still "burn" DVDs with ANY DVD recorder you get; you just can't do it with iDVD with any burner.
As opposed to Quicktime screaming BUY ME everytime you are forced to open that program? There is no doubt that Real screwed up with their marketing campaign, but the request to upgrade to gold is no worse than QT. Dave
2. Apple keeps its iSync API locked up. There are millions of really cool things I could do to make Apple able to synchronize with things like LDAP servers, competing browsers, PC's, etc. But then Apple could use it as a leverage-point to keep people subscribing to the overpriced .Mac program.
.Mac, yet I can still use every iApp with ease. Perhaps Joe Sixpack needs his hand held, but I don't.
Funny that you mention LDAP; Apple supports LDAP in its acclaimed Mail application, so you don't need to write so much as a speck of code to enable it. Getting LDAP support to work is easy as pie.
I don't subscribe to
While the LDAP integration is handy, I don't think it addresses the original poster's point.
My company has a fairly extendable product suite that includes mail, calendar, and contact management. If I could write an iSync conduit to our database, I'd be able to check my calendar and get alarms from my Powerbook, iPod or Bluetooth phone.
That would let me use the interface(s) I like with the data I need, and would let us market OS X as a fully-supported platform. No, my company would probably never have an impact on Apple's bottom line, but as it stands now we can only offer syncronization with Windows users. In the meantime I've got this great all-in-one syncing solution that's completely useless to me, which is pretty frustrating.
IIRC - you only get the plea for Quicktime Pro once per day/24 hours - once you say "Later", it stays gone until the next day. No less annoying, though.
"... dismissing Apple's iTunes service, he points to Real's Rhapsody music service with 1.3m subscribers - which 'in the United States is number one'."
July 2003
"It's hard to design a better scenario for us than what Apple did. Apple serves only 5 percent of the market, and it doesn't offer an all-you-can-eat service, just downloads. One of our challenges is teaching consumers about digital music. It's great having Steve Jobs get the word out, since we have the best service for the 95 percent of people who don't use a Mac."
September 2001
"One of [the] surest ways you could drive Bill nuts was to say that Apple is the company that innovates, and Microsoft is the company that iterates. But I think it's basically true. My goal was to create a company culture that has the same pioneering, innovative spirit that one associates with Apple and that has the persistence, a willingness to go nose to the grindstone, that one associates classically [with] Japanese manufacturing companies, like Matsushita, and with Microsoft."
Now, to put the current Real/Apple relationship in perspective, take a look at this May, 2001 tidbit:
"Today, Glaser's RealNetworks, with 26 million users, beats out both Microsoft's and Apple's offerings. Apple, which has slipped to No. 3 behind Microsoft, continues to lose ground. In January, the number of QuickTime users fell to 7.29 million, down 8.4% from a year earlier, according to a recent survey by market researcher Jupiter Media Matrix. Windows Media Player had 21.5 million users, according to the same study."
Sounds like Glaser is trying really hard to make his position look solid, but he sees the writing on the wall. Consumers are fed up with Real's "hunt for the free download" tactics, and aren't taking to Real 10 the way he'd hoped.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
That's why I just keep QuickTime running in the backgound. There's no convoluted "Taskbar" or "Tray icon" to get in the way. Furthermore, because QuickTime is a component of Mac OS X, the player takes up only 200 kiB of RAM!
I'm not Seth Finkelstein. I still speak the truth.
Because someone out there will probably find this useful, here's how to banish the Quicktime nag screen (known to work in OS9, not tested by me in OSX):
Set your Mac clock a year or so into the future, reboot, play a quicktime file, (going past the nag screen), set clock back, reboot.
The nag screen will go away until 1 day after the date you chose.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
the RealPlayer with ad- and spyware that your are referring to, is it the free version of the commercial version?
It seems like everyone is overlooking how RealPlayer is one of the most obnoxious programs in the universe. It puts itself all over your computer (system tray, explorer bar, etc), is loaded down with ads and spyware, and so forth.
On Windows, perhaps. On OS X, RealPlayer is just a lil' app and browser plugin that plays Real-format files. No more, no less.
Funnily enough, even Windows Media Player for OS X is totally ad-free and stripped down. Shame it's got pretty crappy performance.
MSN Messenger for OS X also has an option to turn off the 'Promotional Pane' at the bottom of the contacts list. Not 100% sure why we get special treatment, but OS X users don't seem to get screwed with that kind of commercial invasion.
Huh?
What he's saying was that the comment about the iTMS making little profit was referring to them having sold enough songs to cover the fixed costs - the initial costs of buying hardware, developing the store software, and running ads. As they're making about 30 cents a song, unit costs included, the store will make a profit - most likely quite a large one.
It hasn't provided a profit so far because all the money made went to paying off the initial investment. Now that that's (close to) done...
Seriously. Take a basic economics class.
The iTMS has produced a small profit this quarter, according to this.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
I just downloaded a "crackz" registration code off the internet. I don't have any interest in the "Pro" features - I just wanted to get rid of that annoying box that assailed me every time I used Quicktime.
Is that illegal? Quite frankly, I don't care. I'm just fixing my operating system, which I paid for. The advertised Quicktime support was broken, and I fixed it.
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
iChat doesn't use Pixlet. It uses the industry standard H.263 video codec. Look at the summary for the (currently) third link in those Google results.
mbbac
You can knock that out easy... Later goes by your calendar date... It just waits a day or two to pester you again. If you roll your calendar forward... THEN press later. Roll your calendar back, and then bang, no more upgrade annoyances. For some reason it won't allow you to do it past 2029, though... I guess that's when it'll all come crashing down....
Real uses AAC.
mbbac
Define "make about 30 cents a song".
IIRC that's Apple's cut of the 99 cents. Out of that 30 cents comes all the cost of running the store -everything from paying salaries to bandwidth costs in addition to the costs you mentioned.
Set your date way into the future, you'll need to disable NTP, change date, launch QT, quit QT, tell it to nag you later, enable NTP.
The next time you see that nag should be the day after the date you set your date to in the future.
Real Helix nightly builds 'n tarballs goodness/
It looks like this will be RealPlayer 11. I am not sure how usable the code is at the moment though...
450 000 subscribers, up 100 000 from previous q. The 10 consecutive month w. growth. RealNetworks still delivers a lot of contents, and Apple would be incredible stupid to ignore it.
Okay, many people out there hate Real for their past. I've been using Real since back in the day, too, and have had the same complaints. But, I have been using RealPlayer 10 (the latest update to RealOne player) and I will say it leaves little left to complain about.
First, the annoying Adware defaults to off, except for alerts relating to software updates. You can shut those off, too (you couldn't in the past) simply by clicking on the "View Real Message Center" icon, then click on "Options -> Customize Message Center" and uncheck Software Updates, then click Save Changes. No more popups.
And if you're really paranoid (I am) you can go to Tools->Preferences, then navigate to Connection->Internet/Privacy and uncheck all the privacy settings. You're anonymous.
What do you have left? A great player that can play anything except Ogg Vorbis (which pains me, believe me). But it plays iTunes AAC files, MPEG4, MP3, AVI, QuickTime, DVDs, CDs, RealAudio/Video, WAV, Windows Media, AIFF, and more.
I bought 7 songs from Real's music store this week and I couldn't be happier. The downloads were fast, the quality incredible (192 Kbps AAC files compared with iTune's 128 Kbps AAC files and Napster's 128 Kbps WMA files) and has the best, most liberal license for its users IMHO.
I've also heard people say that Real is Linux-Unfriendly. WHA? It's the only company that makes a Linux client. There is no Windows Media Player or iTunes for Linux, but there is a RealPlayer for Linux. In fact, it allows you to play your Apple iTunes music on your Linux box. I think that's very Linux-friendly.
Happy Real Customer tryin' to keep it real....
Consider the daffodil. And while you're doing that, I'll be over here, looking through your stuff.
Stuffit Expander from Aladdin Systems comes to mind. MS Office too. Photoshop.
Install Little Snitch and have a look for yourself.
Code is Speech. No to Censorship.
Maybe you need to take some business economics. Most startup R&D costs are not amortized in the first year of business. Sorry, but just because Apple says they turned a profit on the music store does not mean that it is paid for. Also, they have continually stated that it will be a break even business. This is probably because things like bandwidth and credit card charges and other per song charges eat up enough of the $0.30 that even at hundreds of millions of songs they will only see a small profit from which salaries, hardware costs, marketing etc will need to be paid.
What the hell are you babbling about, and how did this get modded +4 Interesting?
I can't speak to Real's formats being proprietary, although as I understand it, they are based upon open standards. Rather, I'll focus on AAC.
AAC is an open standard, part of the MPEG4 specification. Anyone can license it. The objectionable part of Apple's for-pay music store is the FairPlay DRM that is used to wrap the AAC content. FairPlay isn't an open standard, although supposedly it can be licensed; since Apple didn't actually create FairPlay, one could theoretically license the technology from the developer, although I have no idea whether Apple has an exclusive agreement with them.
Rather than parroting someone's party line in a blatant attempt at karma whoring, you might try qualifying your statements and making sure you specify their scope.
It's unlikely Apple would use someone else's streaming media technology when they have streaming video and audio support in Quicktime that is "good enough." At that point, the real question is whether Apple can introduce a product that is a souped-up iPod that supports real time streaming media (presumably over a wireless connection), and do so at a price point where consumers will buy the product in appreciable quantities. If the user experience and the cost are both excellent, fine; otherwise, it makes no sense to even talk about selling such a product.