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Rob Glaser Responds, Talks Up Real Networks
The 10 questions we sent Real Networks CEO Rob Glaser were selected from 37 that were moderated +5 about 24 hours after we posted the "call for questions" last week. As promised, Glaser answered them himself rather than through PR people, but since part of a CEO's job is to be his company's number one booster it's not surprising that his answers have a high PR component to them; yours would too if you were in his position.
1) Apple Support - by ack154
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?
Glaser:
No plans as of now.
We're one of the most active Mac ISVs around, with our RealPlayer running on millions of Macs. We also offer our Superpass and RadioPass premium content products, and we offer more than 45 premium downloadable Mac games such as Shape Shifter, Bounce Out Blitz, and Text Twist.
Having said that, since the Mac is such a small part of the overall market, we make practical decisions about what functionality and services we offer on the Mac. So far, offering a music store or the Rhapsody subscription service on the Mac hasn't made the cut.
2) It still comes down to price, for a lot of us - by erick99
How much wiggle room is there in the pricing of the songs? Forty-nine cents a song has made me a customer of Real's for now ( I haven't tried any .99 cent services - don't want to pay that much). I know it's unlikely that music can be sold that inexpensively but we know it doesn't have to be .99 since WalMart is doing .88. So, I am wondering what RealNetworks' pricing strategy will be. While I understand you cannot differentiate on price alone, the rest isn't going to matter if the price is .99. I just won't buy at that price (yes, obviously others will, but I maintain that multiples more will at a sustained, lower price).
Glaser:
Here's a long answer to a short question.
The music industry supports 2 models of legitimately selling music services that allow consumers to listen to a jukebox in the sky (but not keep the music), and services that sell a permanent copy of the song to the consumer. We have 2 different services depending on which model consumers want.
The best deal out there today for price-sensitive customers who love music is our Rhapsody music service (www.Rhapsody.com). It is a jukebox in the sky type of service that allows consumers to listen to as much music as they want for a fixed price of $10/month. Then, when consumers find a song they want to own permanently, the song costs 79 cents, basically a membership discount for Rhapsody subscribers.
After just a year of us running the Rhapsody service (We acquired listen.com last August), we have hundreds of thousands of Rhapsody subscribers who get great value out of the service. In fact, our average Rhapsody subscriber listens to over 200 songs/month, including over 100 different songs. If the consumer had to purchase all those different songs they'd be paying over 10 times as much as what Rhapsody costs.
Our RealPlayer Music Store is a pure example of the second model. As part of our introduction of our Harmony technology (which allows digital songs to play on a virtually any popular MP3 player), we put every song in the store on sale at 49 cents. The promotion was a smashing success, resulting in us selling over 3 million songs in about 3 weeks.
The 49 cent for everything promotion is now over, but it was such a big success that we decided to continue to feature a Top 10 list of songs for 49 cents each, with the rest of the songs back at the usual price. This is also going well and our store sales are well ahead of where they were before we launched Harmony, which says to us that a lot of people like what Harmony offers and are going to continue to buy from us for reasons of more than just price.
Now let me answer your question about why songs cost 99 cents (or 88 cents or 79 cents, but not usually 49 cents). Selling songs legitimately consists of 3 components: the cost of the recording, which we usually pay to the record company (who then pays the artist); "publishing" cost which goes to the company that owns the rights to the musical composition (who pays the song writer); and other costs such as credit card fees, bandwidth, and technical support.
While wholesale prices vary depending on the label, today most labels charge approximately 65-70 cents per song. Publishing costs a fixed rate of about 9 cents per song. And the other costs average a few pennies per song. Thus, as we have made clear, selling every song in our store for 49 cents a song is not sustainable unless/until the labels change their pricing philosophy.
Based on the data we've seen, we think, long-term, the pricing that will result in the biggest overall market for music will involve some kind of tiered pricing new mainstream songs for 99 cents retail, and up-and-coming artists and back catalog artists at a lower price.
We are working with the labels to prove this to them. We think over time we will succeed, but it will take time. The more that customers support our efforts both directly (by voting with your wallets) and by communicating directly to the music industry, the better.
3) Media formats and proprietary control - by Performer Guy
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 lock-in than genuine technological differentiation. What is Real doing to improve this situation and are other vendors likely to cooperate?
Glaser:
We have done a number of things in the past few years to address interoperability and to move digital media toward much better and stronger interoperability while also supporting open source development on our platform through the Helix open source licensing program.
The single biggest thing we've done in the past year -- and maybe ever -- was to create Harmony, which (as you probably know) is a technology that translates between the main secure audio content formats Helix DRM, Windows Media DRM, and Apple's DRM.
Going back a few years, we took the core of our media delivery system, Helix, and made it open source. We then built a universal media delivery system -- Helix Universal Server -- on top of that platform. What's more, we fundamentally changed our software development methodology for Helix to a community-based approach. Indeed, we strongly encourage slashdot readers to join the Helix community at helixcommunity.org, as thousands of developers have already done.
We also have been active supporters and drivers of a number of open industry standards including RTSP for streaming and UPnP for media delivery across devices.
We think these initiatives are consistent with where the net is going much more focus on open systems and open formats, and much more focus on interoperability.
Unfortunately, competitors of ours such as Apple and Microsoft haven't followed suit. They have their own reasons for this. Apple apparently is focused on controlling an end-to-end secure music system, and Microsoft is focused on extending their proprietary Windows platform everywhere.
In light of this, we remain committed to enhancing interoperability and openness wherever it makes sense. However, what we haven't done is "unilaterally disarm" in the way that, for instance, Netscape did. All that would do is allow competitors with proprietary agendas to "embrace and extend" on top of our formats, while keeping their own proprietary, which ultimately wouldn't achieve anything.
4) Turnabout? - by Elwood P Dowd
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?
Glaser:
We would be happy to cross-license our DRM and formats to Apple to enable exactly the kind of interoperability you propose.
As has been widely reported, we approached Apple about licensing their DRM several months ago. It was only after they rebuffed those initiatives that we came out with Harmony, which implemented software compatibility with their DRM as well as with Microsoft's.
5) Why is Real's software so intrusive? - by jerkychew
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?
Glaser:
We have put a lot of effort into making our users happy and in giving users lots of choice in how they install and use our software. We have learned a lot over the years and I think if you look at RealPlayer 10 for Windows, Mac, or Linux carefully, you would find that it gives users much more choice and control over how our player works than any other major media player, including Microsoft's Windows Media Player or Apple's iTunes.
While I'm not 100% sure, from your description it sounds like you have a previous version of RealPlayer. In RealPlayer 10, the user can select Tools/Preferences/Automatic Services and configure all of the background activity, including features that remain active when RP is not running. With just a couple of mouseclicks, the user can disable all background services.
Compare how our software works to Microsoft's. Have you ever tried to "uninstall" Windows Media Player? All Windows does, in its own words, is "removes access to Windows Media Player from the Start Menu and Desktop," yet it doesn't actually get rid of the software. If you uninstall RealPlayer, we uninstall the whole enchilada. Same with mime types: we ask you what mime types you want our player to play, and then we only play those. On the other hand, when you upgrade your version of Windows, it takes the mime types it wants to without even asking. What's more, we've been told by reliable sources that Microsoft writes into its contracts with computer OEMs that the OEM MUST make Windows Media Player the default player for major mime types, otherwise the OEM doesn't get access to critical marketing funds that every PC manufacturer needs to stay in business.
Regarding your question of why we have put the features you want on specific menus, I will ask the guy who runs our player product group to take a close look at how we can make control of the specific features you have described even more obvious. My guess would be that the tradeoff is making the features available to technical users without confusing average users. Even so, we'll try to do even better next time. I promise that we will do our best to keep improving our software for both regular consumers and technical users.
6) Helix - by MikeMacK
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?
Glaser:
Our reasons for creating the Helix community and to making the core of our system open source are the reasons best described in Eric Raymond's classic manifesto The Cathedral & the Bazaar (I imagine you all have memorized your favorite link to it, but in case not: http://www.redhat.com/support/wpapers/community/cathedral/whitepaper_cathedral.html).
Basically we realized about 3 years ago that digital media was becoming huge and ultimately it made much more sense for us to open up our system so it could be the foundation of great work by everyone rather than the work done just by our company and close allies.
What's more, we fundamentally changed our software development methodology to a community-based approach for Helix. Three years and tens of thousands of Helix community members later, we've made lots of progress. We know that this is a long-term process and that proprietary-based media delivery systems won't go away anytime soon. But this is no different than the Linux versus Windows battle.
7) Legality of Harmony - by halo1982
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?
Glaser:
The legality of Harmony under the DMCA is well established in law. It's important to understand that Harmony simply added a new way to secure the content we've licensed from music companies. We didn't mess with the locks on any of Apple's music. The DMCA contains a specific provision enabling companies to create just this kind of interoperability. Take a look at a recent case, Chamberlain v. Skylink, which describes how courts look at this in the real world.
We think it would be extremely anti-consumer for Apple to stop the music by intentionally breaking compatibility with Harmony. In the event that they do, we have a comprehensive plan in place, but it's not appropriate for me to go into details now. I will point out that Harmony will continue to work for any current iPod user who chooses to have RealPlayer manage that iPod (and who doesn't use iTunes, a future version of which might be the vehicle that Apple would use to break compatibility).
8) Nice, but.... - by dacarr
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?
Glaser:
I don't think it's about one division at Real versus another. It's about software versus services. We have made a significant commitment to delivering Linux versions of our software products on both the client and server side, and we're grateful for the support we've received from the linux community.
Delivering consumer services on Linux would be a new step for us; indeed, there are very few content services available today for Linux, reflecting the fact that the Linux desktop market is still quite nascent.
So, what we're doing now is looking at ways in which our Linux efforts can gather enough momentum that makes this a simpler decision. We're working closely with the Linux distributors to grow the market for Linux desktops by having a solid media player solution. And we're investigating which of our service offerings we can offer to Linux users in a cost-effective manner. Our goal is to start building a direct revenue base that we can then use to fund more ambitious efforts.
9) Lessons learned from astroturfing - by michaeldouma
There's a lot of spin going on at Real's new Freedom of Music Choice [freedomofmusicchoice.org] site. Clearly, Real was not expecting such a profound and immediate [slashdot.org] backlash. It must be frustrating [slashdot.org] that Apple gets to be both an underdog and a monopoly at the same time. But despite the feel good claims [freedomofmusicchoice.org] 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?
Glaser:
We're very happy with how our freedom of choice campaign for Harmony has worked. As you know, we sold over 3 million songs in 3 weeks, well beyond our expectations. Moreover, the tens of thousands of users who have bought songs from us and are continuing to enjoy the benefits of Harmony speak for themselves.
It's certainly true that a small group of Mac lovers gave us a hard time for criticizing Apple. This isn't that surprising because Mac users are very sensitive anytime anyone criticizes Apple, I guess because they emotionally identify with Apple as the "underdog" versus Microsoft. But for every Mac user who didn't like our criticizing Apple, there were literally hundreds of Windows users who enjoyed Harmony, including iPod users who sent us their comments (see http://www.realnetworks.com/company/press/releases/2004/real_3million.html).
The campaign was successful because consumers really do want choice. We hired an independent research firm to ask internet consumers about this. 96% of portable device owner said they thought they should be able to move music they bought to any device, which gives us great confidence that we're on the right side of history.
10) Strategy Question - by Anonymous Coward
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?
Glaser:
Well, your question has more than a bit of a "when did you stop beating your wife" feel to it, but I'll address the core question, which is what are we trying to do and how are we doing.
Since many SlashDot readers don't necessarily read all the details of our financial statements, let me talk a bit about our business. 2004 is on track to be the biggest revenue year in our history. In the first half of the year we had sales of $125.9 million. Our second quarter sales were 65.5 million, which is 32% over our revenue for the same quarter last year. We ended the quarter with over 1.4 million subscribers to our premium services, including over 550,000 subscribers to our music services, both of which were records and make us #1 in the business.
In terms of our products, Rhapsody is not only #1 in subscribers, it also wins pretty much every review as the music service that is best and easiest to use. RealPlayer 10 was also PC Magazine's editors' choice and also many other awards.
Of course we have competitors if we were a monopoly you would have other reasons to criticize us. :)
Having said that, we're as different from our competitors as Yahoo is from its competitors. We're focused on creating services that deliver great experiences to consumers regardless of what platform they use. This is very different from either Apple or Microsoft, both of whom center their services on their proprietary platforms (Mac/iPod in Apple's case, Windows in Microsoft's case).
I started RealNetworks more than ten years ago because I believe strongly that the Internet can and will transform how people experience media, giving them unprecedented control over what audio and video they experience, and when, where, and how they experience it. While there have been many twists and turns along the way, we're very pleased with the progress we're making both as a company and as an industry. And we feel great about the opportunities in front of us.
With that, I'd like to that you all for your questions and for taking the time to read and think.
Best,
Rob
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?
Glaser:
No plans as of now.
We're one of the most active Mac ISVs around, with our RealPlayer running on millions of Macs. We also offer our Superpass and RadioPass premium content products, and we offer more than 45 premium downloadable Mac games such as Shape Shifter, Bounce Out Blitz, and Text Twist.
Having said that, since the Mac is such a small part of the overall market, we make practical decisions about what functionality and services we offer on the Mac. So far, offering a music store or the Rhapsody subscription service on the Mac hasn't made the cut.
2) It still comes down to price, for a lot of us - by erick99
How much wiggle room is there in the pricing of the songs? Forty-nine cents a song has made me a customer of Real's for now ( I haven't tried any .99 cent services - don't want to pay that much). I know it's unlikely that music can be sold that inexpensively but we know it doesn't have to be .99 since WalMart is doing .88. So, I am wondering what RealNetworks' pricing strategy will be. While I understand you cannot differentiate on price alone, the rest isn't going to matter if the price is .99. I just won't buy at that price (yes, obviously others will, but I maintain that multiples more will at a sustained, lower price).
Glaser:
Here's a long answer to a short question.
The music industry supports 2 models of legitimately selling music services that allow consumers to listen to a jukebox in the sky (but not keep the music), and services that sell a permanent copy of the song to the consumer. We have 2 different services depending on which model consumers want.
The best deal out there today for price-sensitive customers who love music is our Rhapsody music service (www.Rhapsody.com). It is a jukebox in the sky type of service that allows consumers to listen to as much music as they want for a fixed price of $10/month. Then, when consumers find a song they want to own permanently, the song costs 79 cents, basically a membership discount for Rhapsody subscribers.
After just a year of us running the Rhapsody service (We acquired listen.com last August), we have hundreds of thousands of Rhapsody subscribers who get great value out of the service. In fact, our average Rhapsody subscriber listens to over 200 songs/month, including over 100 different songs. If the consumer had to purchase all those different songs they'd be paying over 10 times as much as what Rhapsody costs.
Our RealPlayer Music Store is a pure example of the second model. As part of our introduction of our Harmony technology (which allows digital songs to play on a virtually any popular MP3 player), we put every song in the store on sale at 49 cents. The promotion was a smashing success, resulting in us selling over 3 million songs in about 3 weeks.
The 49 cent for everything promotion is now over, but it was such a big success that we decided to continue to feature a Top 10 list of songs for 49 cents each, with the rest of the songs back at the usual price. This is also going well and our store sales are well ahead of where they were before we launched Harmony, which says to us that a lot of people like what Harmony offers and are going to continue to buy from us for reasons of more than just price.
Now let me answer your question about why songs cost 99 cents (or 88 cents or 79 cents, but not usually 49 cents). Selling songs legitimately consists of 3 components: the cost of the recording, which we usually pay to the record company (who then pays the artist); "publishing" cost which goes to the company that owns the rights to the musical composition (who pays the song writer); and other costs such as credit card fees, bandwidth, and technical support.
While wholesale prices vary depending on the label, today most labels charge approximately 65-70 cents per song. Publishing costs a fixed rate of about 9 cents per song. And the other costs average a few pennies per song. Thus, as we have made clear, selling every song in our store for 49 cents a song is not sustainable unless/until the labels change their pricing philosophy.
Based on the data we've seen, we think, long-term, the pricing that will result in the biggest overall market for music will involve some kind of tiered pricing new mainstream songs for 99 cents retail, and up-and-coming artists and back catalog artists at a lower price.
We are working with the labels to prove this to them. We think over time we will succeed, but it will take time. The more that customers support our efforts both directly (by voting with your wallets) and by communicating directly to the music industry, the better.
3) Media formats and proprietary control - by Performer Guy
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 lock-in than genuine technological differentiation. What is Real doing to improve this situation and are other vendors likely to cooperate?
Glaser:
We have done a number of things in the past few years to address interoperability and to move digital media toward much better and stronger interoperability while also supporting open source development on our platform through the Helix open source licensing program.
The single biggest thing we've done in the past year -- and maybe ever -- was to create Harmony, which (as you probably know) is a technology that translates between the main secure audio content formats Helix DRM, Windows Media DRM, and Apple's DRM.
Going back a few years, we took the core of our media delivery system, Helix, and made it open source. We then built a universal media delivery system -- Helix Universal Server -- on top of that platform. What's more, we fundamentally changed our software development methodology for Helix to a community-based approach. Indeed, we strongly encourage slashdot readers to join the Helix community at helixcommunity.org, as thousands of developers have already done.
We also have been active supporters and drivers of a number of open industry standards including RTSP for streaming and UPnP for media delivery across devices.
We think these initiatives are consistent with where the net is going much more focus on open systems and open formats, and much more focus on interoperability.
Unfortunately, competitors of ours such as Apple and Microsoft haven't followed suit. They have their own reasons for this. Apple apparently is focused on controlling an end-to-end secure music system, and Microsoft is focused on extending their proprietary Windows platform everywhere.
In light of this, we remain committed to enhancing interoperability and openness wherever it makes sense. However, what we haven't done is "unilaterally disarm" in the way that, for instance, Netscape did. All that would do is allow competitors with proprietary agendas to "embrace and extend" on top of our formats, while keeping their own proprietary, which ultimately wouldn't achieve anything.
4) Turnabout? - by Elwood P Dowd
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?
Glaser:
We would be happy to cross-license our DRM and formats to Apple to enable exactly the kind of interoperability you propose.
As has been widely reported, we approached Apple about licensing their DRM several months ago. It was only after they rebuffed those initiatives that we came out with Harmony, which implemented software compatibility with their DRM as well as with Microsoft's.
5) Why is Real's software so intrusive? - by jerkychew
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?
Glaser:
We have put a lot of effort into making our users happy and in giving users lots of choice in how they install and use our software. We have learned a lot over the years and I think if you look at RealPlayer 10 for Windows, Mac, or Linux carefully, you would find that it gives users much more choice and control over how our player works than any other major media player, including Microsoft's Windows Media Player or Apple's iTunes.
While I'm not 100% sure, from your description it sounds like you have a previous version of RealPlayer. In RealPlayer 10, the user can select Tools/Preferences/Automatic Services and configure all of the background activity, including features that remain active when RP is not running. With just a couple of mouseclicks, the user can disable all background services.
Compare how our software works to Microsoft's. Have you ever tried to "uninstall" Windows Media Player? All Windows does, in its own words, is "removes access to Windows Media Player from the Start Menu and Desktop," yet it doesn't actually get rid of the software. If you uninstall RealPlayer, we uninstall the whole enchilada. Same with mime types: we ask you what mime types you want our player to play, and then we only play those. On the other hand, when you upgrade your version of Windows, it takes the mime types it wants to without even asking. What's more, we've been told by reliable sources that Microsoft writes into its contracts with computer OEMs that the OEM MUST make Windows Media Player the default player for major mime types, otherwise the OEM doesn't get access to critical marketing funds that every PC manufacturer needs to stay in business.
Regarding your question of why we have put the features you want on specific menus, I will ask the guy who runs our player product group to take a close look at how we can make control of the specific features you have described even more obvious. My guess would be that the tradeoff is making the features available to technical users without confusing average users. Even so, we'll try to do even better next time. I promise that we will do our best to keep improving our software for both regular consumers and technical users.
6) Helix - by MikeMacK
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?
Glaser:
Our reasons for creating the Helix community and to making the core of our system open source are the reasons best described in Eric Raymond's classic manifesto The Cathedral & the Bazaar (I imagine you all have memorized your favorite link to it, but in case not: http://www.redhat.com/support/wpapers/community/cathedral/whitepaper_cathedral.html).
Basically we realized about 3 years ago that digital media was becoming huge and ultimately it made much more sense for us to open up our system so it could be the foundation of great work by everyone rather than the work done just by our company and close allies.
What's more, we fundamentally changed our software development methodology to a community-based approach for Helix. Three years and tens of thousands of Helix community members later, we've made lots of progress. We know that this is a long-term process and that proprietary-based media delivery systems won't go away anytime soon. But this is no different than the Linux versus Windows battle.
7) Legality of Harmony - by halo1982
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?
Glaser:
The legality of Harmony under the DMCA is well established in law. It's important to understand that Harmony simply added a new way to secure the content we've licensed from music companies. We didn't mess with the locks on any of Apple's music. The DMCA contains a specific provision enabling companies to create just this kind of interoperability. Take a look at a recent case, Chamberlain v. Skylink, which describes how courts look at this in the real world.
We think it would be extremely anti-consumer for Apple to stop the music by intentionally breaking compatibility with Harmony. In the event that they do, we have a comprehensive plan in place, but it's not appropriate for me to go into details now. I will point out that Harmony will continue to work for any current iPod user who chooses to have RealPlayer manage that iPod (and who doesn't use iTunes, a future version of which might be the vehicle that Apple would use to break compatibility).
8) Nice, but.... - by dacarr
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?
Glaser:
I don't think it's about one division at Real versus another. It's about software versus services. We have made a significant commitment to delivering Linux versions of our software products on both the client and server side, and we're grateful for the support we've received from the linux community.
Delivering consumer services on Linux would be a new step for us; indeed, there are very few content services available today for Linux, reflecting the fact that the Linux desktop market is still quite nascent.
So, what we're doing now is looking at ways in which our Linux efforts can gather enough momentum that makes this a simpler decision. We're working closely with the Linux distributors to grow the market for Linux desktops by having a solid media player solution. And we're investigating which of our service offerings we can offer to Linux users in a cost-effective manner. Our goal is to start building a direct revenue base that we can then use to fund more ambitious efforts.
9) Lessons learned from astroturfing - by michaeldouma
There's a lot of spin going on at Real's new Freedom of Music Choice [freedomofmusicchoice.org] site. Clearly, Real was not expecting such a profound and immediate [slashdot.org] backlash. It must be frustrating [slashdot.org] that Apple gets to be both an underdog and a monopoly at the same time. But despite the feel good claims [freedomofmusicchoice.org] 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?
Glaser:
We're very happy with how our freedom of choice campaign for Harmony has worked. As you know, we sold over 3 million songs in 3 weeks, well beyond our expectations. Moreover, the tens of thousands of users who have bought songs from us and are continuing to enjoy the benefits of Harmony speak for themselves.
It's certainly true that a small group of Mac lovers gave us a hard time for criticizing Apple. This isn't that surprising because Mac users are very sensitive anytime anyone criticizes Apple, I guess because they emotionally identify with Apple as the "underdog" versus Microsoft. But for every Mac user who didn't like our criticizing Apple, there were literally hundreds of Windows users who enjoyed Harmony, including iPod users who sent us their comments (see http://www.realnetworks.com/company/press/releases/2004/real_3million.html).
The campaign was successful because consumers really do want choice. We hired an independent research firm to ask internet consumers about this. 96% of portable device owner said they thought they should be able to move music they bought to any device, which gives us great confidence that we're on the right side of history.
10) Strategy Question - by Anonymous Coward
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?
Glaser:
Well, your question has more than a bit of a "when did you stop beating your wife" feel to it, but I'll address the core question, which is what are we trying to do and how are we doing.
Since many SlashDot readers don't necessarily read all the details of our financial statements, let me talk a bit about our business. 2004 is on track to be the biggest revenue year in our history. In the first half of the year we had sales of $125.9 million. Our second quarter sales were 65.5 million, which is 32% over our revenue for the same quarter last year. We ended the quarter with over 1.4 million subscribers to our premium services, including over 550,000 subscribers to our music services, both of which were records and make us #1 in the business.
In terms of our products, Rhapsody is not only #1 in subscribers, it also wins pretty much every review as the music service that is best and easiest to use. RealPlayer 10 was also PC Magazine's editors' choice and also many other awards.
Of course we have competitors if we were a monopoly you would have other reasons to criticize us. :)
Having said that, we're as different from our competitors as Yahoo is from its competitors. We're focused on creating services that deliver great experiences to consumers regardless of what platform they use. This is very different from either Apple or Microsoft, both of whom center their services on their proprietary platforms (Mac/iPod in Apple's case, Windows in Microsoft's case).
I started RealNetworks more than ten years ago because I believe strongly that the Internet can and will transform how people experience media, giving them unprecedented control over what audio and video they experience, and when, where, and how they experience it. While there have been many twists and turns along the way, we're very pleased with the progress we're making both as a company and as an industry. And we feel great about the opportunities in front of us.
With that, I'd like to that you all for your questions and for taking the time to read and think.
Best,
Rob
...with the software. His recall of the procedures on how to disable certain features is certainly impressiv------------*buffering*
-Randy
I know that if you have time to add such 'comments' as "it's not surprising that his answers have a high PR component to them; " that you should have time to dupe check...
/., I really really do.
Seriously, why add that? Nothing like that was added to the CA interview and the CA VP didn't anything important about anything, it was just 100% PR BS.
I miss the old
I don't know about anyone else, but I really respect Rob's answers. I think that we threw a lot of hard questions at him and he answered each one without avoiding the issues. Even the questions which would have just offended many CEO's were answered in a very professional manor. I might have to take a second look at Real, even though I swore several years ago to never install another copy of the Real player.
The icons are also annoying, but the quick launch/desktop/start menu icon insertion is pretty standard for software installs.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
If you can find a way to install his music on your Mac he wont stop you. However no company can throw money away by supporting a platform that wont recoup the cost of devlopment. This is just sound buisness stratagy. The iPod is the #1 MP3/DRM player on the market, so they want to support it. The Macintosh is not the #1 desktop platform on the market, so they dont want to support it. Seems to be logical to me.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
...you must give Real your email address and allow them to install some executables into your startup folder.
me 2!!1!
I was rather impressed. He answered every question, though occasionally obliquely to avoid portions of the question that are harder to put into a good light...
However, I will never install Real again, no matter what media I could see with it. The company has destroyed my trust in them in the past; and while they may no longer be deserving of unmitigated loathing, I cannot bring myself to trust them far enough to install them. Once bitten, twice shy.
Raven
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
"Compare how our software works to Microsoft's. Have you ever tried to "uninstall" Windows Media Player?"
Comparing something to a turd does not make it smell like roses.
Anything is possible given time and money.
Haha, take another look at his response to the question about the obscene invasiveness of Real Player.
He avoids answering why Real has taken over your computer by default for the past 5 or so years, insisting that NOW everything is a-okay (arguable). And then to throw keen-eyed slashdotters off the trail he bashes microsoft a little so that you forget about it. Tell me this guy doesn't know how to cater to the slashdot audience!
The thing is, the comparison to WMP isn't really appropriate since the question's complaint wasn't at all about the uninstallation procedure, it was about the invasiveness of running the program. The fact that you can't easily uninstall WMP is an entirely different evil. When was the last time you've heard somebody complain about the Window's Media Player Messaging Center popping up with ads and shit? Or the last time WMP decided that it should be the program that you view JPEGs in?
Overall, I thought he did an OK job answering questions.
But in the very last question he just seemed wrong:
Having said that, we're as different from our competitors as Yahoo is from its competitors. We're focused on creating services that deliver great experiences to consumers regardless of what platform they use. This is very different from either Apple or Microsoft, both of whom center their services on their proprietary platforms (Mac/iPod in Apple's case, Windows in Microsoft's case).
It seems to me that Apple is actually very focused on the Windows platform, at least in terms of iTunes and ITMS and the iPod. Now if he'd mentioned PLAYER platforms, I think his point would have hit home a lot more.
If terms of store support, ITMS is more cross platform than any other service (well, apart from the dark horse AllOfMP3.com or Emusic - perhaps I should say "major onlne music service").
Come to think of it, I wish someone had asked him how they plan to compete against AllOfMP3.com.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Apple isn't "evil" for not supporting other music stores on the iPod. They clearly have no obligation to do all of the work necessary to allow other music stored to store music on the iPod.
But if someone else wants to do the work, then the "evil" is in trying to stop them.
Real Player 10 is really nice on Linux. I am pretty impressed by it. I mean, it has completely changed my view on Real. It just does what its supposed to and nothing else (and it supports ogg and theora, a big plus in my book). Has anyone had any issues with it? I seriously cannot find any major flaw with it.
Regards,
Steve
The basic point is customer credability is earned, not claimed.
Not to beat a dead horse, but Real as a company seem to have some of the worst standards out there in terms of how they treat their customers.
They purposly took the most agressive approach to making money, and the least user friendly approach (ie, message center important alerts which always turned out to be about superpass combos, they used to spam me non-stop without letup, taking over associations left and right on express installs).
Behind these decisions to screw over users were people who said, make it impossible to disable / uninstall this feature.
My question was (and was rated +5 but not picked),
"Until the people change, why should we think you've changed? Have you fired people? Admitted past mistakes? Will future features be honest features, or 'features' designed to make us all miserable?"
Interesting stuff to think of the people making these types of decisions...
As a note, if you ever want to know which companies take over computers in non userfriendly ways go to a senior center and look at the computers. Claria / Realplayer / Spyware paradise.
I agree that this is hypocritical, but look at it this way:
1. Real getting into the iPod market provides an immediate benefit for Real (and its customers), as it lets Real reach a very significant percentage of current and future MP3 owners.
Clearly this is good for Real's bottom line.
2. Real entering the Apple market by supporting OSX (or other MacOS) customers is not as immediate a benefit for Real, as making a significant ROI would be like trying to push water uphill.
There are several reasons for this, including the relative size of the OSX market to the Windows market, the competition, the resources it would divert from other projects, etc. In other words, the number of sales that Real could hope to get from the small minority of potential customers that own Macs, want to buy music online, and are willing to shift allegiances from iTMS to Rhapsody is probably minimal compared to the cost of going after those customers.
Clearly this isn't as good for Real's bottom line. In fact, it would probably lose them money and, as Real isn't a deep-pocket monster like Microsoft, it can't afford to invest in projects that have little or no chance of showing a return.
Ironically, the best thing that Mac owners who would like to be able to use Rhapsody can do is hope that/encourage Apple to let Real into the iPod market that it wants, because once Real is able to service iPod owners it is more likely to go the whole hog and support Mac customers too, if for no reason other than a large percentage of iPod owners also own Macs and it's their Macs that they would use to buy music for their iPods.
Unfortunately for Real, they need Apple's cooperation and support far more than Apple needs them, so don't expect anything to come out of this: it's just not in Apple's interest to open the doors to the iPod/Mac music download market to Real or anyone else.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
>Well, your question has more than a bit of a "when did you stop beating your wife"
/. knows, when your not so computer savy brother/sister/friend etc... asks you how to install real as they wanna hear some scratchy sound on the net and your response is NEVER EVER EVER install Real Player or anything with "Real" in its name... not EVER EVER. Never. You will just cause your self headaches... If you must install something, find an alternative. The Real suite WAS the closest thing legit commercial software got to being a virus or whathaveyou...
He beats his wife? For shame!
Seriously though if he wants to be sucessful Real has got to change their neferious ways of intrusive installs... As probably everone on
Noticed I said "WAS", and also notice that Glaser mentions some new verion of REAL... well I wouldn't know as I would NEVER (ever) download the stuff, such a bad impression was made upon me it will take a LONG time to regain credibility as a legit company.
anyway thats my rant.
Why do you say that Real wants to steal Apples IP?
I suggest you google for Compaq vs IBM BIOS before you say the reverse engenering for interop reasons is stealing of IP.
Who wants to bet that the comprehensive plan involves selling songs for 25 cents a pop until they go out of business...
The one fault they also seem to share is that they get geek speak, but I'm not sure they truly understand. IOW, they understand the promise of the really open market, but don't live and breathe it in their business. So they're better than many of the alternatives (like our dear MS Borg), but still aren't taking advantage of the full market they could get if they made that extra step and truly opened up...
FWIW, I've spent money with both companies in the past, and will do so again if Rhapsody ever does offer a Linux version.
Obligatory plug - please check out my online novel
Responding to an AC, what will my mother think?
Think:
Real/Rob says: We support the popular platforms.
They are consistent in targetting the iPod (popular) and discarding the Mac (so so popular). Notice Linux is in that discard pile as well, unless we're willing to help them develop the stuff in the first place.
Now, I don't support the decision, but to call 'hypocrite' is just wrong.
Anything is possible given time and money.
Did you not read the part where they tried to license Apple's DRM and Apple refused? How about the part where Real would be *happy* to license to Apple? He'd be quite happy with the 2-way street.
"Stealing Apple's IP" is pure, unmitigated bullshit. They simply created software that would allow non-Apple music to play on an iPod. The horror!
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Am I the only person who, when reading "yours would too if you were in his position", thought, 'Gee, thanks roblimo, I guess I am a sellout!'?
I don't see why being a CEO automatically means you must be dishonest with your customers. Is this some rule of economics that I haven't learned in school yet?
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
they edited it and removed all the messages.
Rob, when did you stop beating your wife?
If you don't like a type of food, do you go on a personal crusade to ensure no one ever eats it ever again? Probably not.
If you don't like Real's business strategy, DON'T USE IT. I personally don't like the real player, never have, probably never will. I do, however, use Rhapsody and I think it's a fantastic service for the price. But that's off topic.
The real question is why Real (or any other company for that matter) perceived as a malicious company? They are being cast as villians for having stupid business practices? Last I checked they weren't out forcing you to install the product. If it sucks, it sucks, and that's Real's problem in terms of business strategy. It's not an insult to your person for god's sake.
Yea yea, it's invasive. Yea yea, it's annoying. I get it, and I happen to agree. So I don't use or buy the products that are annoying. I installed, didn't like it and uninstalled. Live and learn.
But but but, how come I can't use it on x platform? Well, if you really want to use it that badly, I suggest you go to real and pitch a business case to them for why they should spend the extra time and money developing for your platform. Just because you use it[the platform], doesn't mean the majority of the target demographic uses it. Son of a bitch, Real is out to make money? LYNCH THEM!
If the product isn't what you want, it means the marketing and development failed. It doesn't mean they are evil. Grow up.
While I don't think he was as dodgy as he could have been, I think your praise goes a little far. For instance, he says Harmony is perfectly legal, but when asked whether it would be alright for Apple to create software that deals with Real's DRM without a license, he says that they'd be happy to discuss licensing with Apple. .ogg and .mp3 then? No problem playing mp3s in an ipod (or any other DAP for that matter).
Also he makes Real out to be the advocate of interoperability and open platforms. Why not sell music in
If someone responds to an interview request from Slashdot, they should be required to give us geeks the stright skinny. They may not, of course, but they should be held to that standard.
1 Apple and Linux don't have the user base to make them worth our while.
.rm, we'd sue their asses off. They won't license to us, so we won't license to them. Nyah.
2 Online music won't drop below $.79/song until we can beat the RIAA into lower fees.
3 We use a proprietary format because if we didn't, we'd get crushed by MS and Apple. If Apple, however, figured out how to play
4 We write annoying and intrusive software because Microsoft does it too (and our annoyances aren't as bad as their's are).
6 Helix gives us street cred in the OS community, that's why we do it.
7 We had our lawyers look very closely to make sure Apple couldn't sue us over the iPod. We don't expect any trouble. And don't worry, you'll always be able to play Harmony on your iPod, as long as you never use iTunes again.
8 See the first summary item for Linux support.
9. Based on "independent" consultants on our payroll, people want alternatives to iTunes. That must mean they want us. We lost a million dollars in 3 weeks selling music at below-cost, so it must be true.
10. I have not stopped beating my wife, but more to the popint, our company is raking in lots of dough. We're not making any profit, or I would have given you profit numbers instead of revenue numbers.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I've been a very happy rhapsody subscriber for a couple of years. They've done everything right. Good pricing, elegant interface, lots of additional artist information available, tight and fast performance, no ads, no spyware, lightweight, low overhead, etc. When I'm on a PC, it's playing music and never disrupts what else is going on, even with processor-intensive applications running. It just works perfectly and unobtrusively. Plus, their library is extensive and always expanding.
Naturally, when Real bought Rhapsody I got scared. Rhapsody uses WMP and Real is reportedly looking to switch over to RM. This could be good or bad. They can use a lightweight realplayer with rhapsody to send me tunes and easily add Linux and MaxOS support in the process, or they can use the current memory-consuming version of RP10 that doesn't run under Linux, and I'll cancel my subscription. The version of RP10 for Linux is much lighter than the Windows version, but ironically, they don't offer it for Windows.
I'm not real optimistic.
If you can find a way to install his music on your Mac he wont [sic] stop you. However no company can throw money away by supporting a platform that wont [sic] recoup the cost of devlopment. [sic] This is just sound buisness [sic] stratagy. [sic]
It's also a sound business strategy for Apple to deny Real access to the iPod. It waters down Apple's "we control everything, so it all just works" credo and it risks technical support problems and customer dissatisfaction if a future iTunes upgrade unintentionally breaks the Real backdoor. So, by your argument, Glasser should stop whining, too.
To the guy who asked why there was such a problem diabling all the crap Real installs. "Install the latest version!" uh. No. Why would I trust Real to play nice?
Even the questions which would have just offended many CEO's were answered in a very professional manor.
Hmm, I don't really care what type of building he was in when he answered the questions, it's the way he answered them that really matters...
Get it? Manor... ?
OK it's lame, you can mod me down now.
Tie these two together:
Our RealPlayer Music Store is a pure example of the second model. As part of our introduction of our Harmony technology (which allows digital songs to play on a virtually any popular MP3 player), we put every song in the store on sale at 49 cents. The promotion was a smashing success, resulting in us selling over 3 million songs in about 3 weeks.
and
While wholesale prices vary depending on the label, today most labels charge approximately 65-70 cents per song. Publishing costs a fixed rate of about 9 cents per song. And the other costs average a few pennies per song. Thus, as we have made clear, selling every song in our store for 49 cents a song is not sustainable unless/until the labels change their pricing philosophy.
That 3 million song block sold cost them between $810,000 and $960,000.
I have to wonder if they really get enough other new sales to offset losses like that. It does seem that they are making money, but some of that money is from premium services.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We're one of the most active Mac ISVs around, with our RealPlayer running on millions of Macs.
Get real, Glaser. That just means that Real's users are active. The company, on the other hand, has provided years of consistent support for the Mac: consistently late, consistently buggy, and consistently slow. That's pretty much par for Windows ISVs who happen to port to the Mac. It puts them ahead of the large number of Windows ISVs who don't port to the Mac, but utterly unexceptional otherwise. I will give them credit for not littering the Mac RealPlayer with adware like the Windows version.
Now, real Mac ISVs like Adobe, Wolfram, Stone Design, they're actually active and timely with updates. And there's a host of independent shareware and freeware developers who are far, far more receptive and responsive still!
He wants Apple to let him install his music on the iPod, but won't let us install it on our Mac OS computers.
Right, because we all know that if they came out with a Mac version of their software, Mac users would abandon iTunes in droves to get a piece of it.
Geesh.
Go back and read the foaming-at-the-mouth Mac lunatics who thought it was just awful that Real had "hacked" the iPod to allow-gasp- other music to play on it. Those people aren't Real's customers. They're Steve Jobs' customers, and they'll follow him to hell and back. Anyone who tries to break in on the Mac turf will be met with their resistance.
Glaser's smart enough to know who his market is, and he's working that market. More power to him.
Do you have ESP?
Using that same logic, you could say "Since the driver in front of me ran the red light, I'm going to run the red light as well." Would you jump off a bridge because another person did?
Real may have gotten better at uninstalling in version 10. But why oh why are we at version 10 before the thing uninstalls cleanly? Why are we at version 10 before the adware in the "free" version (what a misnomer) is less offensive? Why are we at version 10 before the mime-type land-rush has stopped? That should have never gone into the product in version 1.0.
Pisses me off when software won't completely uninstall itself. There's nothing a good rm -rf shouldn't undo.
The one thing that makes me happy about Real is watching it succumb to the same forces that destroyed Netscape. Look at the parallels - a small company formed around a pretty innovative product. It awakens the sleeping Giant (in Netscape's case that was MS; in this case it's Apple and MS). Freaks out and spawns an "open source initiative" (Mozilla vs HelixCommunity's hxplay). Get ready to go the way of the DoDo bird, Real.
And take your damn spyware with you.
-c
Do it for da shorties
Not to beat a dead horse, but Real as a company seem to have some of the worst standards out there in terms of how they treat their customers.
Especially if, by customers, you mean "People who have been duped into installing Real's software package and can't seem to get rid of it."
I'm not so naive as to expect Realplayer to ask if it wants to uninstall every time it runs, but essentially, Real Networks lives off of cheap-shots, parlor tricks, and ignorance. I installed Real on a friend's computer *LAST NIGHT* and I still had to scroll down in the preferences box, past lots of UNCHECKED items, to get to the list of CHECKED items (previously hidden by the unchecked list) which say "Do you want Real to send you lots of annoying crap?"
Come now. That's not being open to your customers, that's being duplicitous and cheap. This guy should realize that.
So Real wants Apple to open up licensing of iTunes DRM so they can undercut Apple on a non-Apple platform?
In other words, "We want you to let us use your DRM for our music store which won't run on your OS so we can compete fairly with your music store." Does that not make sense to anyone else?
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
"Dave, I stand still--the conclusions jump to me!" - Bill McNeal, NewsRadio
Real entering the Apple market by supporting OSX (or other MacOS) customers is not as immediate a benefit for Real, as making a significant ROI would be like trying to push water uphill.
This kind of thinking which prioritizes short-term profit is exactly what got Real into trouble before. Without thinking of the benefits of consumer loyalty, Real produced software that disregarded users' settings, which placed parts of itself in disparate places, and that made it difficult for most users to uninstall it. The result of such thinking was a backlash against Real, one strong enough to erode whatever loyalty/preference it once had in the media player market.
Fast-forward to 2004. Apple users are legendary for their brand loyalty. Any company that works in this space understands that pleasing users is the raison d'etre (French for "reason for being") of Mac-based companies.
Real claims to see no benefit in offering the service to Mac users, but for more than a year, iTMS was Mac only, and in that first year the sales of iTMS tracks eclipsed the sales of all the other contenders combined. Even in the face of this historical reality, Real says that its research doesn't lead it to conclude that the Mac market is worth going after. Maybe Real are right. But I strongly suspect that Real's music service is going to be broken sooner than later and when that happens, they will have no one to cry to except for Windows users who can't listen to their Harmony songs on their iPods.
If, on the other hand, Real had a cohort of Mac users that could (read would) complain to Jobs and company about their Harmony-purchased songs being broken . . .
Are you listening, Mr. Glaser? This is the sound that "getting it" makes. Service your potential markets, don't dis them outright.
blog
> If Apple, however, figured out how to play .rm, we'd sue their asses
> off. They won't license to us, so we won't license to them. Nyah.
This one is wrong. It should be:
We would be happy to accept Apple's check to license our useless (to Apple) tech. But we all know that won't happen because Apple is all about keeping people as locked into Quicktime's own codecs as possible.
> Based on "independent" consultants on our payroll, people want
> alternatives to iTunes.
This one is also wrong. The quote was:
"96% of portable device owner said they thought they should be able to move music they bought to any device,"
Suprised it was only 96%. That question is about as controversial as "Do you think puppies are cute." Of course you should be able to play purchased music on ANY player. Which is why you should not part with good money for crappy low-bitrate DRM encumbered music.
Democrat delenda est
Thing is, Rhaspody doesn't support MacOS because it's a minority platform with only a few percent of the market. Yet with it and Harmony, he expects Apple to make sure their iPods remain compatible with a minority music store with only a few percent of the market.
Dear Pot, Thanks for the memo. -- Kettle
Have you even used Real's offerings? If not, let's keep our opinions of quality to ourselves.
Apple's community is generally fiercely loyal. While apple's standards are usually high, they tend to be supported by their community even when they're not the best available option. Any attempt to create a competitor to iTunes Music Store on the mac will almost certainly be a failure unless they have something VERY special to offer, and given how similar the various music store offerings have been to date, this seems unlikely.
Back in college, my best friend had a fairly current Mac, while I used NT 4 on an older x86. He fancied himself a graphic artist, but 99% of the time he was doing more mundane stuff -- gaming, e-mail, IM and word processing. This was in the pre OSX days, back when Macs had no preemptive multitasking, and my system performed so much better for him that I frequently had to kick him off my PC so I could get some work done. He constantly bitched about the interface, but he still used it far more than his own computer.
NT clearly better suited his needs, so when he decided to get ANOTHER new computer (even though his was just over a year old), I assumed he'd be coming home with a PC. To my astonishment, he bought another Mac, because, as he said, he was an "Apple supporter". So, for the whole next year I had to fight to use my, by then downright ancient, PC.
I don't doubt that even then the Mac was far superior for some tasks, and the situation has greatly improved with OSX, but many Mac users still seem like they'd be perfectly content to follow Steve Jobs off a cliff. Until that changes it's going to be very difficult for any company to compete with Apple on the Mac, and nearly impossible an area like music sales, where it's challenging to differentiate yourself and Apple already dominates the market.
Steve and his customers may be on a one-way trip :-)
Yes, MacFans, that was a joke.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
However no company can throw money away by supporting a platform that wont recoup the cost of devlopment.
But they'll sell 3 million songs below cost?
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Thanks for the post. We completely agree with you that credibility is earned, not claimed.
To the heart of your question, What has changed? Why would the company change? What motiviation does the company have to change?
First and foremost, our business model has changed. Today over 80% of our revenue comes from Consumer SERVICES. Services that our customers rave about to their family/friends. For example, RealRhapsody, our all you can eat music subscription service, is the number 1 rated music serice. Why buy songs when you can access over 700,000 for $9.95/mo. Another example is our STARZ! Ticket on Real Movies, which allows you to downloads as many feature films as you for $12.95/mo.
Second, our product development process has changed. Today, we build the heart of the RealPlayer nightly within the Helix Community. this process has allows us to have a tigher communication process with our users and developers. When we develop our products publicly, there is little room for non-essential features.
Third, actions must speak louder than words. As other posters have attested to. Check out he latest free RealPlayer 10 for Windows, Mac or Linux. If you don't think we have lived up to your rightfully high expectations, uninstall it. You can unstall everything. Its just that simple.
Finally change is hard. But I think you will find that we have changed on numerous fronts, for the better.
Kevin
Kevin Foreman
Hi folks,
I'm Rob Lanphier, and I'm the Development Support Manager for RealNetworks. Among other things, I'm responsible for guiding our Helix Community initiative.
I'm glad to see some of the good comments here. People are starting to see that things have have changed.
There's been some comments on ethics, and how a company "can never be trusted again" after making missteps. It's very frustrating for me personally because it belies a certain naivete about how companies and the world works, as well as the fact that the meme really limits the potential of doing some really great things. It also bugs me because, well, I like to think of myself as a very ethical person.
As Jamie Zawinski pointed out, you get a lot of people together, and stupidity inevitably ensues. It's practically unavoidable. However, there's also an upside to getting a lot of people together. Some things just take a lot of people to do.
We're building out an infrastructure for delivering music and other media to a lot of folks over the Internet, and building the partnerships with media companies and technology companies to pull it off. In the process of doing that, we're managing to build a lot of great technology that we're making available as open source, much of it even GPL
If we're successful in really getting the industry to rally around this infrastructure, not only will the world have a kickass open source media infrastructure, but we'll have shown other previously skeptical that it's not an utterly insane thing to do. However, if it doesn't work out, it'll be yet another counterexample of why building open source isn't compatible with the business world.
It's been really cool to see how the Helix Player/RealPlayer for Linux effort has gone. Our Freshmeat ranking continues to climb at a great pace, and we're seeing a lot of downloads. If anyone is worried about what's in that player, look at the source code. Hopefully, we'll be able to further roll that model of building software out to other parts of our business.
At the end of the day, companies are just people. You get a big enough group together, and you'll find there's good people, and there's bad people. I suppose you can lump us all together, and say that the group as a whole is bad. Or you can take the more pragmatic approach. Rally behind the good people in the group, and help them guide the rest down the right path.
Rob
And if we want to go off-topic for a bit, when I was simply a PC user I did not know what high standards for user experience were. Since moving over to OS X primarily (and quite unexpectedly as I only got a Mac to test a web site with), I've realized what I've been missing. OS X really is that great, but most PC users will not be able to conceptualize why until they use the Mac environment first-hand and in-depth. I fell into that group too. I was all too wound up with individual features and specs that I was missing the forrest for the trees and being penny-wise pound-foolish. I now spend more time getting work done and doing so more effectively and enjoyably. The interface is consistent -- most of the third-party developers (Real not included) respect this consistency on the Mac and create their own excellent and consistent software.
Note that if you do end up checking out a Mac and enjoying it, realize that your eyes will be open to things you didn't bother with before, and nothing will be more frustrating than having to worry about dependencies, or apt-repositories or compilation on the Linux platform; or ill-though-out, poorly skinned, inconsistent user interfaces on Windows. You'll wonder why you even have to run installation/uninstallation wizards instead of just drag & drop setups like on OS X. You won't have to worry about device drivers, and Rendezvous will make you wonder why the hell networking is so convoluted even today. You'll wonder why the hell no other platform offers a single, universal spell-checking feature for all applications to use. It's like opening up Pandora's box but it containing nothing but goodness :-)
"When did you stop beating your wife?" is a question which assumes the subject has been beating his wife. It's use in his response is not meant as an insult to the poster, merely pointing out that the question assumes that Real has no unique product.
Predictive text is shiv!
Thanks for the reply Rob. In all honesty what many of us geeks want to see is that there are people who make decisions at tech companies who don't have to sugar coat everything or dumb down everything. I think that the real player for Linux is a fine product, hell the fact that it exists means a lot. Sometimes it seems like media companies consider Linux to be a four letter word, so the fact that Real addresses this adds street cred.
Oh, and don't worry about those that say real "can never be trusted again." Most of these people live in an Tin-Foil cage. Many geeks are willing to give Real a second chance, and I for one am impressed by Glaser's comments.
Open Source Sushi
What he fails to mention is that they still lost 4.6 million that quarter.
See I don't get this. If iTunes, prior to the release of a Windows version could sell millions of songs how can you not want to tap that small of a market that generates that much of a product?
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
So now Real says Apple is being a bully, while they attempt to maintain a business model 100% based on bullying. When I say "Why shouldn't Apple do this?" Rob's honest answer might be "Because we would sue them, file a DMCA complaint, and do our best to smear them as hackers in the media." (Because Real can't break compatibility like Apple via an iTunes update. Their software is deployed.)And the way they did it was by building a competing implementation of another company's DRM system. So is that ok? Why shouldn't Apple do this?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Thanks for the encouragement. When I have face-to-face conversations with folks (trade shows, Linux user group meetings, etc) this is usually the tenor of the conversation. It's usually only when people get online that people sport their tinfoil hats come out.
That's why I'm often told "ignore the Slashdotters". While I don't let it get under my skin, I have a hard time ignoring it outright, because that's the only exposure a lot of folks have to the hard-core technologist (read "geek") community. I, of course, say that as a geek who has been reading Slashdot/Chips-n-Dips since 1997.
What's interesting to me is that I wonder how many of these people are just as frightening in person as they are online, or if they are paper tigers. I suspect it's a little of both.
That leads to the followup question: how does the geek community take back this bullhorn from the most shrill among us?
Rob
So much for me moderating anything in this thread.. =]
I use Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. iTunes is an entire solution. The same songs I can buy from the store, I can play on 5 Macs, sync to my iPod and listen to throughout my household with AirTunes. I cannot do this with Real's software.
I can't say much for Real, but with MSFT's Music Store, the music I download is encoded in 160kb/ps WMA (would it have been anything else?), I can burn a playlist up to 7 times, play the music on up to 5 Windows PC's, and copy the music to a list of 70+ portables an unlimited amount of times*. 'Course, I don't know if WMP or the MSN Music store is available for the mac. If not, this is probably moot, but it does tie into the 'user experience' and 'total solution' part you ranted on about reguarding iTunes. Apple is not the ONLY company that pays attention to it's customers. MS, by far, isn't the best, but they have done a VERY good job with music.msn.com.
Once it has my billing info, I click 'buy', 'confirm', and in the background, the song is transfering (for the three songs I've bought so far, it only took a minute or two on my 384kb/s downstream to download the songs). I must say I'm quite impressed so far.
*(Source - music.msn.com, click on the 'learn more' link at the top of the page).
The rest of what I wanted to say I won't even bother quoting from your entry.
It is all nice and well that you were so easily able to just 'switch' over and all was right in your world. That simply isn't the case for quite a few of us.
Example 1: At work we use a service program from TigerPaw software. There simply is no version for the Apple offerings.
Example 2: Asheron's Call/City of Heros. I dont' play the former any longer, but neither (as of this writing) are available for any Apple product, no matter how much I spend. Yea, I could play it in a VM on OSX, but it would never perform how it would nativly.
I could go on, but this entry to this thread is already too large. The same reason I cannot just switch to another platform (Apple or not) is the same reason Real won't make their store work for Linux or Apple. It's a Catch22. The store doesn't exsit becasue they believe the userbase doesn't exist. The userbase doesn't exist because the things people would like to do on (insert platform here) don't exist.
Wish companies would realise that one of these days.
bork bork bork!
You've pretty much proven my point. Rather than looking at a corporation as a monolithic entity, you can look at it as a collection of individuals to influence one-by-one.
I'm not going to respond to the specific grievances you lay out. I could try to step up as a spokesman for the teams responsible for that stuff, but I'm not going to, other than to say the following. Most of these things have not affected me personally, and for the stuff that has, I've spent a lot of personal political equity complaining about to those folks. However, I think a lot of the charges against of are blown WAY out of proportion to what actually happened. But, I don't want to get into a big argument about that stuff, because it's not what I'm personally involved with.
What I'm personally involved with is a lot of great initiatives that should mean a lot to this community. Getting open source media playback on cell phones. Making the Linux desktop a viable alternative to Windows by providing world-class media solutions.
So, before continuing to prove my point by comparing a company to an individual, and then using the word "you" in a sloppy way as to possibly indicate you are making a personal attack on me, just think a little bit. You are entitled to your opinion, but you aren't obligated to share it. Keep this thought in mind: are the words you write really making the world a better place?
Rob
--"Stealing Apple's IP" is pure, unmitigated bullshit. They simply created software that would allow non-Apple music to play on an iPod. The horror! --
.
That's not what they did at all...
iPods natively support several formats without DRM including uncompressed AIF, MP3 and AAC.
What Real did was create software that allowed them to sell DRM 'protected' media using Apple's DRM wrapper. The competitive advantage Real is trying to deprive Apple of is Apple's hitherto unique ability to sell protected music to iPod users or act as intermediary between content provider and customer in that sale process (skimming a cut of course).
Real could have sold *un* protected music in any of several formats to iPod users without any reverse engineering of Apple's DRM.
Real could have chosen to sell DRM protected music that wouldn't play on the iPod and told their customers to complain to Apple that music they bought from Real wouldn't play on an iPod.
What Real chose to do was decide unilaterally that they wanted to be able to sell *protected* music to iPod users and engineer a method of using Apple's DRM without Apple.
Now that you actually understand what they did you may freely debate the various ethical positions
Every time a story about Real comes up, it is apparent from the comments that their past history is still getting in the way of them achieving their goals. While they are the only major media company supporting Linux, and they are doing a lot of good OSS and interoperability work, there are some that will always cringe when they hear the name "Real".
I think there are only two ways for them to address this:
1. A buyout and/or namechange. This would be something substantial to indicate the Old Real is gone for good. Something substantial like this might allow them a fresh start, although if bought out by the wrong company, they might lose a lot of the good aspects of the current company. A buyout by an OSS friendly company would be preferrable if this happened.
2. Real addresses the issue head-on, and very publicly. Draft policies that ban the tactics that people object to, and somehow assure everyone that they will be followed no matter what. Make sure RealPlayer 10.1/11 does not ask for registration, does not auto-start by default, and doesn't run any services. Maybe asking on first run or during the install whether services such as "StartCentre" and "Updater" should be run would be appropriate. That way, a default install of RealPlayer does nothing more than play Real files when the user comes across them. Nobody could complain about such simplicity, especially if there were guaranteed assurances from Real that the player would not have intrusive software installed with it in the future. I know the current player is very good and unintrusive, but unfortunately for Real, RealPlayer will be judged by a different standard than other products due to its past. Go further than what should normally be "far enough" in making the player simple.
Since the player is losing ground to Quicktime and MS Media Player, promoting such a free player should be a high priority. The player should be very prominant (if not the most prominent item) on the front page. Real can worry about advertising their for-pay products on pages to do with their music services, and other such popular areas of Real.com.
But getting the free player back on many machines, as well as getting Real to be a trusted brand again, should be priority #1 at Real. Real is doing some great things, and have huge opportunities to make gains in many areas of online media, if they can only get rid of that dirty feeling that techies get when they hear "Real".
Diversion. This is a false distinction. As one who has tried the product and who has felt burned each and every time, I and many others have a valid beef with the product, and by extension the company. This monolithic company versus collecton of individuals is just straw-man nonsense.
So, before continuing to prove my point by comparing a company to an individual, and then using the word "you" in a sloppy way as to possibly indicate you are making a personal attack on me, just think a little bit.
<sigh> First of all, no personal attack was inteneded to you, by which I mean Mr. Rob of robla.net. As you, Mr Rob of robla.net, have volunteered yourself as a representative of Real, it is completely fair and by no means "sloppy" to use the word "you" to refer to both Mr. Rob of robla.net as well as the company he purports to represent, Real Networks of Seattle. As someone who claims to have been around Slashdot for so long, you (Mr. Rob of robla.net, not Real Networks of Seattle) should already know that that nitpicking about pronoun selection traditionally indicates the dying gasps of a weak argument. But whatever, enough diversions, that isn't the main point.
You are entitled to your opinion, but you aren't obligated to share it.
I think you either missed my point -- unlikely -- or have just chosen to respond in a diversionary way -- very likely -- with this monolithic vs collection of individuals nonsense, and asking what I have done to make the world a better place. The point here is that after 10 years of treating your customers with contempt, you can't expect us to join hands with you and sing Kumbaya.
So again, you sound like you are starting to do the right thing, but for
Keep this thought in mind: are the words you write really making the world a better place?
Keep this thought in mind: Stay on topic.
One more question: Does your new music service sell Kumbaya? <ducks>
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
I think Glaser should have been given a "try again" on questions 1) and 4).
They weren't answers at all. In fact, question 4) was actually the most repeated question in the forums moderated or not. It was also the most important question on many other websites [read as many other mac web sites] - as I am not sure this interview was making much headline everywhere else.
As for the answer to question 9) - shame on slashdot for even allowing him to lie like a politician and say that there was ANYthing positive out of the freedomofchoice music site REAL put up and shame on him for saying it was just Mac users, a lot of linux was mixed in there as well. If it was so positive why did they remove the comments?
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
I don't think Glasser was whining. When Apple didn't give him want he wanted, he achieved his goals without them.
One, just because MS CLAIMS they have 328 million Windows users doesn't make it true. There. Fixed that for you.
I'm surprised nobody asked about Rob's purchase of the PBA (Professional Bowlers Association) along with a few of his tech-sector friends. Over the past few years they have gained a lot of ground in increasing the popularity of bowling and legitimizing it as a professional sport. Wired had a great article on it this month at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/kingpin.h tml.
After watching the re-emergence of poker, I think that the PBA has a real shot of revitalizing bowling with the right marketing. Regardless of how I feel about Real, I'd like to see the PBA venture succeed.
--Josh
So exactly what I said. My Costly Dual G5 gives me a relative performance benefit over most PCs, which changes the perception...cost independent. Because when one is making a decision of 1 platform or the other being faster, that's not really based on price. Price is something else entirely!