January 8, 2004
Follow up on Real’s Store
News.com tries to explain it. Kevin Doran and Brad Hill (post on Real not online yet) have excellent critiques.
Kevin reports that RealPlayer10 doesn’t enable clear access to Rhapsody, thus going against reports that the store would “whet appetites for the” subscription service. I wonder: why didn’t they integrate the two together a la Napster 2.0?
Brad discusses myriad technical and design problems among other annoyances. He draws conclusions along the lines of mine regarding Real’s using yet another proprietary DRM format.
This whole business about RealPlayer playing iTunes files seems rather silly to me. Apparently, RealPlayer is just accessing a currently installed version of iTunes/Quicktime in the background – an Apple program, not any program distributed by Real, is still doing the legwork. Sounds messy.
So, I still don’t get what they’re doing. They have now produced a product that is no better than the existing pay-per-download services. In fact, its proprietary DRM makes it worse. Unless everyone flocks to this format and Real dominates the market – highly unlikely, especially given how Real’s file format didn’t take off for anything aside from streams – I don’t see how this will do well. Nor do I understand how they expect to make money if it doesn’t. They can attract people to their other pay services, but, unlike the complementary relationship betwen iTunes and iPod, the download service and other Real services are pretty separate.
Filed by Derek Slater at 2:13 pm under General news
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