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Ask RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser
RealNetworks has always been more Linux-friendly than other streaming media purveyors, and is now moving closer to the open source camp with its Helix Community effort. More recently, Real has made a big media splash by selling downloadable tunes in an iPod-compatible format. Does any of this matter, considering that world + dog seems to be jumping on the downloadable multimedia bandwagon? Can Real once again become "the" streaming media leader? Will Real's 49 cent "limited time only" song download price force other music download vendors to cut their prices? We have no idea, but hopefully Rob Glaser does. He's promised to answer your questions personally (rather than have PR people speak for him). So ask whatever you like. We'll forward 10 of the highest-moderated questions to him by email and post his answers soon after he gets them back to us.
Since RealNetworks is all for "compatibility" and getting their stuff to play on the iPod, when do they plan to offer support for Macintosh users in the Rhapsody music store?
Cheers,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
If Apple continues to make a
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fuss about this, does Real have any plans
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to develop a competing portable music player?
Rob, why doesn't Real drop all the pretense of desiring to have an interoperable solution with the Ipod and actually use one for their downloads site? The Ipod supports a few standard file formats and one DRM encumbered one. If Real were really about customer choice, they'd sell non DRM encumbered files and then be able to shout from a mountain that their music works with the Ipod as well as almost every other digital media player.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Given the ongoing struggle for control of content distribution via proprietary formats, do you see any hope for more vendor neutral formats that don't tie customers to one particular 'technology'? It seems that constantly changing formats often have more to do with vendor lockin than genuine technological differentiation. What is Real doing to improve this situation and are other vendors likely to cooperate?
Boy, this question is really flirting with the line. Real has become one of those companies that geeks put in the catagory of "wouldn't piss on if they were on fire". How are they trying to fix those mistakes? Cutting the price isn't enough when people feel tainted for even using your product.
Never confuse volume with power.
Why does Real player force you to install 100 things you don't need and place icons everywhere, add bloated background tasks / services, insert an item into the task tray, popup daily "real news", take over major formats, etc, when many people only use it to view videos that aren't in any other format? Why don't any of the major software companies offer a lean clean, cruft free version of their software? If REAL offered that, I'd pay for the minimal version before the expanded one!
Will your company ever stop the spyware attacks on users of your products?
Why should we believe anything you say?
Real has gone from a company that I once recommended to being viewed as antagonistic with its customers. From webpages that misdirect people to the non-free Real player, to the ever bloated software, spyware etc. Now it seems as Real is going down the "me too" road, and instead of creating a product people search for, is just another pea in the iPod (sorry about the pun).
Why exactly would I look to Real for anything? What is better (other than price) about anything Real has to offer, compared to Apple, Microsoft, etc? What compelling reason do you offer for me to again look at Real?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
What prompted the creation of the Helix community? Does Real see open source as a way to differentiate themselves from Apple and Microsoft, or where there other considerations?
As it is, RealPlayer is universally despised for several reasons, many of them valid. the few that grind me are:
1. It's more than one click away from the main website.
2. It tries to take over your system as a default media system and sign you up for all kinds of spam on install.
3. It's BUTT ugly. It looks like the rejects from the XP UI team were hired to design it, when the rejects from the QuickTime UI team would have been a better choice.
4. I can't DL the content of RealMedia, like I can with mpeg or quickTime.
5. It's a bit [buffering 10%] too eager [buffering 25%] to send media [buffering 40%] before it's [buffering 75%] ready. And scrubbing [buffering 85%] is nearly [buffering 95%] impossible.
Fix these problems, and people might take Real Seriously. So the question is:
WHEN are you going to fix these OBVIOUS deficiencies that have plagued the player for YEARS?
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
What would you do if the next version of Quicktime could play .rm files, even ones with DRM? Suppose that they respect the DRM, and only play on authorized computers. Suppose Quicktime Pro were capable of creating .rm files with DRM.
Why shouldn't Apple do this?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
hi
could real allow people to create and sign their REAL media that they created at no cost ?
so allow people to create their own online stores rather than sign up to itunes or MSN
this way you just sell server software to ISP's and streaming people (profitable)
regards
John Jones
A long time ago, when Windows 3.1 was new, I appreciated RealPlayer for it's cutting edge technology and highly-optimized video/audio codecs.
But as time went on, Real became a company I distrusted due to their spyware-like behaviour and the fact they tried to hide options to disable said behaviour in their software.
It has gotten to the point where MANY computer users I know simply refuse to install ANY Real products on their computers anymore and even boycott web sites that offer content in Real-only format.
So, why should I trust your company now? How has any of that changed?
Thanks.
Disclaimer - The preceding may have resembled a flame or troll to those who cannot tell the difference between an honset question and a troll.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Are you concerned at all that Apple might sue Real under the DMCA for basically hacking the iPod to allow compatibility between Real and the iPod? If Apple does do this, what measures are you taking to make sure that the files people buy from Rhapsody will continue to play on their iPod after Apple locks Harmony out using a firmware update or something similar, and would you offer refunds to people with iPods who purchased music on Rhapsody?
Remember when you fired us all with no warning and stole all our stock options through a technicality?
That sucked.
Why was Real unable to license the FairPlay technology from Apple? Did Apple simply refuse, or were their terms unworkable?
I am the maverick of Slashdot
While I find it wonderful that Real has embraced Linux, your subsidiary, listen.com, seems antagonistic toward Linux, making it quite clear that they have no plans at this time to move their Rhapsody player to Linux. This tells me of a bit of a dichotomy in your company. Are there plans to resolve this?
This sig no verb.
Why is the free version the hardest version to find on your website?
Why must I choose a custom install and play a game of "catch-em-all" to avoid some of these issues?
Why does Real assume I'm interested in news, updates, libraries, or any of the nonsense that it is configured for by your company?
In short, why does Real feel the need to be so Obnoxious? These are "real" questions posed by "real" users, like here and supported by your own employees!
Strategically speaking, Real doesn't look to be in a very promising position. Its technology, once unique (RealAudio), is now ubiquitous. Its marketing has been, by any account of which I am aware, a disaster. Now it seems like there is no area in which Real has any real strength or over its competitors - RealMedia is eclipsed by Windows Media, iTunes rules the day in downloading and Microsoft is entering that market as well.
Rob, what advantages does Real bring to the table? What can Real do that no other company can do? Why does Real exist? What the hell are you doing?
There's a lot of spin going on at Real's new Freedom of Music Choice site. Clearly, Real was not expecting such a profound and immediate backlash. It must be frustrating that Apple gets to be both an underdog and a monopoly at the same time. But despite the feel good claims on your Freedom site (did you really write those?), your price drop, reverse engineering, and activism are hardly riling up the public. What have you learned from this?
Regarding your little PR war with Apple: Did you ever consider the stunning hypocrisy of your publicly complaining that Apple doesn't offer its users choice of online music stores, and then turning around and making a music store that only supports computers that run Windows?
How successful os the Real Movies partnership with Starz? I am a paid subscriber, and so far the service has been pretty impressive - I can download a 100 movies at any point, and 25 new ones are added each week. Are there any future plans for the Starz/Real partnership?
Will you offer the movies that currently play in movie theaters for additional fees? Will you offer the movies that just came out on DVDs?
Will you promote independent movies and if I work for an independent studio, how can we strike a partnership with Real Networks to distribute the content to your subscribers in some affordable way?
While all the topics presented at the beginning of this thread are interesting, I think most slashdot users (and real users in general) are much more interested in the various foolish choices made in the design of the real player client. Why is the "express" installation so horribly unusable and why is it made so difficult to turn off all the various disruptive features of real player when you do a custom installation (i.e. setting it up so that it doesn't hijack all your file associations, make icons everywhere, etc.). I mean, come on, nobody wants to view JPEGs with real player and hardly anybody wants real player in their quicklaunch tray. Furthermore, since I know Real has addressed these issues in the past and promised a less hostile installer, what the heck is keeping you guys! And on a more aesthetic note, I think it was a silly choice to make real one use a non-standard window. It just looks stupid.
My question to Mr.Glaser is this: Real has made much of its Opensource initiatives, but why is it that the OSS Helix Player is not available for Windows?
Helix must build on Windows as its the basis for all your software, but Win32 users are forced to use the RealPlayer, which some may find undesirable... while other platforms have the option of Helix without proprietary codecs. Is this really choice ?
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Like many people, I'm stuck in a conundrum. I don't want to buy CDs any more because I think music should be cheaper due to cheap electronic distribution. I buy occasionally from iTunes, but fears about "losing my music" when my iBook dies and I forget to back it up often enough or some other weird technical thing renders me music-less because of DRM scares me. And I spend a lot of time listening to music on unsupported players. I like xmms, and I'm going to keep using it, so iTunes means I have to burn+rip to convert stuff. (I finally compiled hymn, but need my key off my iBook, I'm lazy, and xmms's aac player module seems to not compile...*sigh*)
I have basically all the money I want to spend on music. But whether tracks are $.39 or $.99 or $1.99 means nothing to me if I'm worried about just losing them. Some of this music I've already had ripped ot mp3 for like 7+ years now, and I can't even count the number of computers I've gone through, and it's nice and portable.
I think at some point, a brave label or two will band together, open their own store, and just offer raw 160+kbps mp3s for something cheap - probably $.49 to $1.49 for singles (probably based on the buzz level), $2.99 to $9.99 for a cd (again, popularity based pricing)... and will open the floodgates. They will do so much business they will be absolutely stunned. Ever music consumer will be amazingly spending 3x what they use to be. Record companies will be delightfully rolling in profits; consumers will be awash in music and ecstatic... everyone wins. Artists who couldn't sell CDs in the bargain bin will find audiences who will pay $2.99 for their albums, and the music industry as a whole will launch into a new era of growth.
We can only hope they realize that peoplpe hate hurdles, and DRM stops more customers from buying than it stops pirates from buying. Anyone with a clue should realize that a lot of music pirates will NOT buy music regardless of whether its free or not. If it is, they'll get it; if not, they won't. But either way, they won't pay. But many customers will pay for unencumbered music but will buy minimally or not at all from the DRM bin.
This is a stupid question, don't waste an interview question on something like this.
The answer is as follows:
To compete with Napster 2.0, MSN Music and iTunes, Real needs to have a similar amount of music available to them, and a similar amount of big names.
The big names are, for the most part, only available through labels that are members of the RIAA. You can gripe about this if you want, but the fact is that the artists *signed* the form to grant the label distribution rights, and that's exactly what the label is doing.
For Real to get these big names, they need to deal with the RIAA. The RIAA has shown in the past that it will not endorse any music that is not restricted in some fashion... either streaming, or DRM. If the best Steve Jobs could do was 7 playlist burns, you can bet that Real can't do any better.
There. I just answered the question and I'm not even CEO of anything at all. Poof.
Comment of the year
Rob,
= zd nn
Is there any difference between Apple invoking the DMCA on Real's reverse engineering of FairPlay and Real's prior DMCA invocation against Streambox?
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-11-517481.html?legacy
Also, what is your favorite kind of pie?
Rob, What will you do when Apple breaks your downloaded files with an iPod update? Will you refund the customers money if the files do not play. Since you have burned your bridge in licensing fairplay what will happen when your reversing engineering rises to the level of code theft?
And as a side question, How come your company sued another company reverse engineering your codecs? Seems what should be good for the goose should be good for the gander.
When I was hired at Real the stock price was around $52-$54 dollars per share. I was given 10,000 shares in exchange for lower pay. Later the stock tanked, diving down to $9 per share.
Real then did what was viewed at the time as the coolest thing ever: The stock re-entrant program thingy (I forget exactly what it was called.) What it meant was that whatever the stock price was on August 31st of that year would be retroactively applied to our shares, including those that had already vested.
Rock on. Quite a few of us signed up for it on the promise of making our now-worthless shares valuable again. There was some fine print, of course. We had to remain employed at Real or we would lose all our stock, including vested shares.
The bastards fired us one month before the deadline. No warning. Our floor managers didn't even know until that morning that 15% of the entire company would be layed off that day.
I went out for lunch (yummy fish tacos!) and when I returned there was a group of employees and some security guards outside the front door. They weren't letting anyone in. After half an hour word spread that there were layoffs happening but we didn't have any details.
Finally a guy in a really expensive suit came down and told us to go home. We be getting a phone call later that evening to let us know if we still had a job.
The next day I was unemployeed and competing with 30,000 other out-of-work programmers in the Seattle area for jobs.
Now I'm back in Montana making $9/hr and eating a fair amount of ramen.
Real is one of the few companies left that controls a common file format and doesn't also publish an OS. And they're everywhere, from Amazon to NPR. Spyware? DRM? Distractions. This is the ball game. Nothing else matters.
In this time of ethics (and their lack) at the corporate level, how do you feel Real measures up in having EARNED (not just claimed) customer trust.
Do you compare yourselves to folks like Google who even my mother trusts totally?
I ask this in light of your consistent corporate behavior, which has included:
- You used to spam me to no end. And this spamming was EPIC, I still can not believe how much junk you, and how impossible it was to stop getting it.
- Your player started taking over my system, including "important" pop up messages in my "message center" that were nothing but commercial pitches. Do you have any idea what is important in people's lives? Not buying more goldpass/superpass combo's!
- This behavior was clearly calculated, and the options to disable this bloated junk was extremely hard to access or enable (it poped up a warning dialog).
- The fact that corporate help desk folks shudder when end users express install the end user version of the real player virus on their PC's.
- The fact that when I visit older folks I inevitably find that their system has been taken over by Real, and that in addition to the desktop, system tray, message center junk, the associations they have selected (IMAGES in Realplayer? please) make no sense.
Have you focused on serving your customers, or screwing the folks who installed your software for as much cash as you could get from them while hiding behind claims of "features" and "benefits".
Before you claim trust, you have to change the people behind the claim.
I've been in the computer industry since 1995 or so. In that time, I've seen lots of software come and go, and lots of less-than-ethical tricks to keep users hooked on one piece of software instead of another. In my 9 years or so, I've never seen any product as consistently sneaky as Real's media player. I remember back when RealAudio would make itself the default player for every media type it could without asking, which would annoy the tech-savvy user and scare those of us that are less technical.
While it seems that Real has backed its intrusiveness down a notch during the install, I still feel like Real is telling me what to do on my computer instead of the other way around. For example - Telling Real not to start when windows starts is no easy task. I have to go through 3 or four submenus in the preferences until I find the vaguely-named SmartCenter (or StartCenter? I don't have a machine handy to doublecheck the name). Even then, when I tell it not to start with Windows, I am greeted by a scary warning message. Even with SmartCenter disabled, Real's update service still lives in my registry, starting every time I boot windows.
So my question is, why try so hard to force your software on the user? Is it worth the market share to anger and confuse your core audience? Mention Real to the average user, and their first response is "I hate that software. I wish I knew how to delete it."
I've always been taught that it's best to make your customers happy, instead of holding them hostage. Does your business model say otherwise?
I'd only piss on them if they weren't on fire.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
My questions would be:
1. Why did I get for my expensive subscription to the Euro 2004 only crappy video streams?
2. Why should I care about Real since they have ignored my feature requests and pleas for a better software for years?
3. Why should I install another media player that wants me to sell only expensive mini clips and radio stations that are mostly for free anyway?
4. And even when I subscribe to the radio pass, I still get stuttering streams and bad quality - can't you deliver what you promise and charge me for?
5. Why has Real missed the train to develop and support truely open initiatives like DIVX (in the beginning), XVID or the new BBC format?
6. Since Real complains about Apple's ignorance I like to complain about Reals lacking support and ignorance for MD-Players and so many other third party devices. Why am I ignored just because I have a not so cool tool?
7. Why is Real Server software so extremely expensive compared to Apples streaming solution?
8. Why does every media player have such a fancy interfaces that follow no standards except their own? Can't you comply to the standards of the OS the player is running on?
9. When will Real admit the failure and stop doing the RealArcade? There are hardly any unique products in there and I can buy most of them without the surrounding Real hype.
10. How much money has Real left in the bank to survive against Apple and Microsoft?
That's it.