Goodbye RealNetworks, hello Real Retirement

It looks like Microsoft has given RealNetworks a golden gift horse worth hundreds of millions. Interestingly only half of that is actually cash, over $300M will be in marketing assistance. My bet is that Real, who only turned one profitable year in the last ten will now quietly go away - and probably be acquired by Microsoft itself.

Lets face it, there were only two reasons that Real ever made any more. Number one it was an alternative music technology for all those Windows users who really just hated Microsoft but had to use it anyway (e.g. for work). Using RealPlayer gave them the little "F**k the system!" feeling everytime they fired it up. Number two was as a platform neutral audio technology for all those companies that didn't want to stream their content in two different formats.

Apart fromt these two things Real never really brought much to the table, and furthermore their RealPlayer sucked from the start and still does to this day. Its probably my least favourite piece of software and the first I think about uninstalling when I'm looking to clean up. Even though it looks a tad prettier than it used to they still populate my machine with daemon processes poping up RealNetworks "Messages" all over the place and giving me no way to disable them fully. Finally they have always tried to charge users for using their proprietary technology by making the stunted free player so hard to find that sites using RealNetworks formats had to issue help pages on how to find it.

My belief is that Microsoft will start to support/bundle the RealNetworks formats in WMP, but there will be no more development of their formats. Then we'll see Apple and Microsoft continue to duke it out for the cross platform media player technology, Apple representing the non-proprietary video formats like MP4.

This may all take years, but ultimately with hindsight the golden settlement from Microsoft is going to look like a golden shovel for Real's post-retirement days...