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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.
Anyway, Apple is hedging its bets in a few places. You can easily play OGG formats in iTunes (a tutorial in this month's MacAddict tells how to use the codec), and Apple even includes an OGG icon to use in OS X, though you have to do one or two (easy) things to make it work seamlessly. I don't think Apple is afraid of opening things up except that, for instance, supporting WMA or Real playback on iPods would endanger the iTunes Music Store sales, which provide zero or very little profit to Apple, IIRC, but which sure improve the sales of iPods. Where Real fits into the risk/reward equation is unclear, but why let Real just have a piece of the action? Doesn't look like the profit to Apple is that great.
Good to see someone ELSE is using MS's monopolistic behavior to their advantage.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Dear Apple,
Please please please open Fair Play to use. Please please please. We'll be your best friend. Promise. Plllllleeeeeeeeeeaaaaaassssee! Come on, be a pal! Please please please.
Love,
Real
-m
#
# Modus Ponens
#
Real won't be missed, it hasn't done anything of value to the marketplace or userbase for years now.
Is that really a threat ? Does Rob Glaser really think Microsoft would ally with Real networks ? I could see Microsoft maybe buying them out, but has Microsoft ever allied with direct competition ? It seems like more of an empty threat to me.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
Maybe they'll all reject Real and it'll just go away!!!
or does the NY Times photo of Glazer make him look like he lives in a van down by the river?
;o)
And hitting the government cheese pretty hard as well
Granted, I don't care for real, even though "Air America" seems to like it (hello? Streamed MP3, folks - more universal, damn it!)
Anyway. It all boils down to "What does Apple want?" If it wants to sell iPods, this is part of the whole "killer move" thing. Right now, I can use my iPod with iTunes Music Store and Audible.com. And since I already shelled out $300 for this portable hard drive/music player, if you're not compatible, I don't want to hear it.
Licensing Fairplay to Real (and yes, I know that Fairplay isn't owned by Apple, but I'm willing to bet they've got an "exclusive agreement" and enough clout to convince the actual owners to let Real in on the fun) would, as the header notes, make the iPod work with Rhapsody. I'm not about to sign up for Rhapsody, but all of the sudden, those "Apple's trying to lock you into their own technology" arguments go out the window. And it sets a good precident: ask Apple nicely, and you can use their service.
But - this is only if Apple sees the prize as iPods. If they see the prize as becoming the de facto standard for online music, which would put them in a very powerful position, they could say "Hm - we have about 60% of all legal music downloads now, and the #1 portable MP3 players. Forget it, Real."
Personally, I think a combination of the two is in order: license with Real as they did with Audible.com. Let Real sell "iPod compatible" songs off of Rhapsody and whatever - but make those same tunes available through iTMS, just like you can buy Audible's site or through the iTunes interface. Everybody gets to sell something, and Apple will gain the "subscription services" so people can pick and choose thier poisen.
Of course, I could be totally wrong - but I won't mind if this scenario plays out.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Exactly. Even though Apple may be accused of high prices, when it comes to software and things like iTunes and its music store, Apple seem to have pleasing consumers as a top priority, the whole Fairplay system is only as cool as it is because Apple wrestled with the Music Indistry on our behalf. Okay I know they are far from altruistic, they are there to make a profit, but they do this by not pissing customers off.
Cut to Real. Ouch, just finiding their free player on their site is a pain in the ass, not to mention all the spyware, the bloated nature of their products... their number one seems to be their advertisers, then their bottom line, then the consumer. My opinion of Apple would go down if they associated themselves with these fools.
Yup...
This would be a VERY wise thing for Apple to do for many many reasons. However, if I were Apple I would ask something in return - allow the real-media format to play as a component of QuickTime.
-_-
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
The Real apple player?
The Fairplayer?
iReal player?
or just call it the RIAA (Real itunes apple authorized) player?
A Fatal OE Exception has occurred, Sig will now reboot.
...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.
I'm not sure.
(geek tries to impress prospective female)
geek: "Look at my cool iPod mini, it's wonderful." (hands the device to female)
female: "wow. it's pretty cute. kind of like you. let me play a song. (pushes button). hmmm. nothing is happening...what does 'buffering' mean?"
(girl walks off not impressed)
I'd think that such a 'strategic alliance' would be discussed in person, or at least over the phone. A single email message doesn't really say commitment.
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
1. Not allowing a person to upgrade a DVD/CD drive to a Superdrive. I bought my PowerMac two months before the superdrive was released. I get to use stupid DVD-RAM disks, but I can't burn DVD's unless I buy a whole new computer.
.Mac program.
.Mac, yet I can still use every iApp with ease. Perhaps Joe Sixpack needs his hand held, but I don't.
Or you could just buy an superiour quality DVD recorder from a third-party. Unlike Microsoft, Apple allows you to use all standards-compliant hardware with their DVD burning software.
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
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
3. USB video cameras, like the ubiquitous Logitech QuickCam, just don't work (well) and Apple seems to have put blocks into place to refuse iChat AV from working with anything but their iSight hardware product. (I exaggerate a little bit here, but not much.)
Such is the price of progress. Face it: USB cameras simply don't have the throughput to push television-quality video the likes of which iChat AV with Pixlet can support. Would you take vacation photos with a so-called "camera phone"? I know I wouldn't. My wife and children enjoy seeing me using iSight: it's a high-quality multivisual experience. Sorry that your piece-of-junk QuickCam won't work with it.
I'm not Seth Finkelstein. I still speak the truth.
"they are dying."
.rm files in WMP anyways thanks to the RealAlternative codec.
"Let them die."
I will not miss Real too much and I know very few of us will. They make a buggy crappy player and it competed with another buggy crappy player for a different equally crappy format. The company with the bigger bank account won. No surprise there. I play my
Apple has nothing to gain by helping Real and it is unlikely that Microsoft wants anything to do with Real except maybe to wait until they are about to collapse and buy them out to own the format.
No one uses Realplayer to play mp3's except for those systems that downloaded the RealOne operating system and can't use anything else to play media files anymore.
I'm sure Glaser has "no idea" how his proposal was leaked.
There's no way Jobs (or anyone at Apple) is going to respond to such a blatant PR move by a floundering company less than 1/10 its size.
Microsoft has the deep pockets and market power to win with these kinds of strong-arm blackmail tactics, but Real? Come on.
I think it's sad Glaser is doing it this way, because there are good arguments for Apple opening up Fairplay to other music services. But Apple is very secretive about its partnerships and alliances (Apple writes into its contracts with manufacturing outsourcing and component producers that they can't publicly admit to it) and they won't want to be seen as even responding to this kind of public pressure from a piss-ant company like Real.
you have it all wrong. Its more like:
(geek tries to impress prospective female)
geek: "Look at..."
(girl walks off)Douglas P. Price
1. Not allowing a person to upgrade a DVD/CD drive to a Superdrive. I bought my PowerMac two months before the superdrive was released. I get to use stupid DVD-RAM disks, but I can't burn DVD's unless I buy a whole new computer.
.Mac program.
.Mac is overpriced, don't use it.
Actually, anyone is free to add any internal or external hardware device they wish, including DVD+/-R/RW drives. However, if you wanted to use *specific* software, like iDVD, with your drive, then you needed to mirror one of Apple's OEM offerings with your purchase. The reason Apple tried to tie iDVD to their "SuperDrive" systems was more one of ensuring a very cohesive user experience, as opposed to the nightmare of support issues and bad reputation for iDVD as people with 400 MHz G4s tried to use iDVD with any old random DVD recorder.
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
It's only a matter of time before there's an iSync SDK. And the second statement is kind of unrelated; if you think
3. USB video cameras, like the ubiquitous Logitech QuickCam, just don't work (well) and Apple seems to have put blocks into place to refuse iChat AV from working with anything but their iSight hardware product. (I exaggerate a little bit here, but not much.)
ANY FireWire video source will work with iChat AV. Any video source at all will work with iChatUSBCam. Again, this decision was made to ensure a good user experience across the board with iChat AV, rather than letting people use any old crappy USB camera, which, right or wrong, reflects poorly on iChat AV.
There is a reason why Apple products work and look great: because Apple tries hard to keep it that way.
The iPod Quicktime-AAC is just another example. Where Microsoft fights to protect it's OS dominence, Apple refuses to make its customers' lives better if it suggests that they might loose the odd dollar in missed hardware sales opportunities.
Well, first, you have to have a monopoly to start talking about monopolistic practices. Even with iPod, Apple doesn't have nearly a "monopoly". And QuickTime, while proprietary, is one of the best media architectures out there, with free live encoding, free streaming servers for multiple platforms, ability to use open standards for playback anywhere, etc. Not to mention that it was primarily Apple and Apple alone that made MPEG-4's licensing - one of the only hopes against Microsoft's VC9 - licensing leaps and bounds more palatable than it originally was. And Apple has to keep its hardware sales up, lest the analysts start a death knell for the 1000th time.
I initially thought this was a good idea. Real gets a lot of credibility, and Apple gets someone else to sell songs for their iPod.
Then I started to think about the competing stores. It doesn't really do either of them any good to be selling the same songs, usually at the same price. I suppose it DOES give incentive to each of them to differentiate from the other store, but that's on TOP of the work that they have to do to offer more than the stores that use WMA.
I think Real's best proposition would be to somehow license the iTunes music store. Rather than set up a whole store on their own which is a huge waste of money - and arguably unsustanable - they could make it so it's possible to buy from the iTMS through their player. Steve would have to hand down some strict interface guidelines, but suddenly the Real player would have a lot of ACTUAL value added. Starting up their own store kind of looks like value added, but it's really just a gimmick when it's so hard to make money, do it properly, sell good music, etc.
At the risk of being labeled a fanboy, I disagree with part of your assertion. Apple does indeed lock hardware owners into an upgrade cycle of buying a new computer for new technology instead of easy upgrading. That's the Faustian bargain of being a Mac owner. I accept it but understand why many don't. Part of the equation is that the hardware is tightly controlled to maintain the usability standards. Would you really want the platform open to the point that you could slap any old hardware in there and pray for no driver conflicts? If so then there is a platform already that works that way. But that's another topic....
.Mac program.
.Mac service. It would be nice to have great software for free that does everything we want it to, but it's perfectly legitimate for Apple to recoup their development costs for those programs by using them to sell more stuff.
Where I differ in opinion is with your complaint about Apple locking their software to their own expensive hardware and services.
"2. Apple keeps its iSync API locked up [...] keep people subscribing to the overpriced
3. USB video cameras, like the ubiquitous Logitech QuickCam, just don't work [...] with anything but their iSight hardware product. (I exaggerate a little bit here, but not much.)"
It's Apple's sales strategy to develop free, or low cost, software to sell additional hardware and services. I hardly see anything wrong with that. In fact it's a great strategy since the software is excellent and there are alternatives available so you are not locked in. You can use AIM or Yahoo messenger instead of iChat if you choose. Yes, I wish my Logitech camera worked with iChat AV because I don't want to buy the expensive iSight camera. But I think it's fair that they give me a great IM program and offer advanced video features if I choose to use the supported hardware. Again, I can choose otherwise and am not locked in. Same with iSync, it's free and works with a lot of things out of the box. But you get more if you buy their
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.
"... 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
So they want Fairplay? Apple should ask Real to provide that broadband content. No specifics, but I'll bet that people that own Apples tend to have broadband easily accessible. Apple can choose to pass on the content in their Quicktime channels for free, or bundle some with their .Mac service (hey, maybe I'd even consider getting it if I did that.)
It would definitely make for an interesting combination.
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
That's all this is. Real has been slowly pissing off whatever customers it ever had by it's borderline spyware coding practices, and then not even giving better performance than the competition (not consistently and not by any appreciable amounts anyway).
QuickTime is far superior. Hell, even WindowsMedia is superior. Real knows their only real hope (pun intended!) is to hitch their wagon to a winning team and ride those coattails until the cows come home.
I personally hope Apple bitch-slaps them back to their hole in the wall, and I hope Microsoft just outright buys them to shut them up (in this singular case I'd be all for that tactic from MS!).
Real just annoys me to no end, and their demise, bu whatever means, can't come soon enough for me.
*
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If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
Real's server model is crap (authentication is a nightmare). Its proprietary codecs aren't good enough to be worth the trouble. Its content isn't worth the trouble to register (and payf for). Helix is kinda useless compared to mplayer, xine, etc. (its browser plugin is useless in konq)
Darwin/Quicktime Streaming Server is a better streaming server solution, and it's free.
Apple partnering with Real? Why? Apple should only partner with Real if they drop Real and go with Quicktime. And at that point, why should Real even exist?
Frankly, WMP is better supported on my platform (Linux KDE/KMplayer/Konq) than Real (the KMplayer kpart bones javascript tests for rm plugins), so what's the point of Real?
Add in the asinine hiding of the free player, and the verdict is:
Death by irrelevance.
Morpheus: BUFFERING...and turn a human being into this. (Morpheus holds up a titty that produces money labeled "consumer")
....BUFFERING....
..BUFFERING.. I didn't. I chose not to. ...BUFFERING...
BUFFERING....
Neo looks down and sees a black cat and then BUFFERING.... BUFFERING... he sees it again.
Neo: deja vu
*Trinity and Morpheus turn around quick, the fast movement of their heads producing a blurred mass of pixels*
Trinty: WHAT DID you say? (audio volume goes from high down to low half volume tin-can resonance for some unknown reason)
Neo: I said... BUFFERING... *screp* *scraaW*
Trinity: *screp* *sreeep*.... BUFFERING....a glitch in the codec
FIVE MINUTE WAIT, 86% LOADED.
Cut to an action scene in slow-mo lots of trails and effects behind the bullets. But it's slow mo in the part where Agent Real comes from hiding behind the grocery bag and shoots at neo.... the part that wasn't slow-mo in the cinema. Directors cut maybe... BUFFERING.....
POPUP - WOULD YOU LIKE TO BUY REALPLAYER GOLD!
BUFFERING..70% RELOADED...
Neo: but I thought I uninstalled you.
Agent Real: I knew I was supposed to follow orders and remove my files and registry entries but
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...
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.