Filed under: Business, Developer, Video, News, Web services
RealNetworks awarded patent victory
In a hard-fought battle, RealNetworks
appears to have won a major patent victory to protect their technology. This is a patent that already faced a
struggle with the Patent Office itself, just to get filed in 1999 (and it took 5 years to do that). But it now looks
like the "streaming through a congested network" magic is owned by RealNetworks... Despite a previous patent
by Apple for the same thing used in QuickTime. Personally, I always thought Real had better streaming, QuickTime had
better downloadable quality. The billion-dollar question: who cares? Will this really affect Real's bottom line? Rob
Glaser (CEO of Real) has essentially said he's not going to go after the "big hair porcupines" in the
industry using the technology. Hm, that would probably be Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe. Who does that leave, YouTube?
Developers aren't rolling their own codecs, for the most part, these days. During the go-go 90's I saw all sorts of
wacky streaming implementations, but you don't hear a lot about this now that broadband keeps growing. You do hear
about different protocols (like Bittorrent) for moving data, but streaming tech this old doesn't get headlines. Yet
that appears to be what Glaser is hoping for, as in the New York Times he's quoted as saying, "We're hoping that
people will say, 'Oh, I get it,' and that this will boost the identity of Helix." Well Rob, one can dream, eh?
This sounds a little like those patent-to-profitability games dying tech companies play. They're bleeding money after
innovating, so they sue everyone on old patents to make some cash. Sounds like Real doesn't want to play that
game, but will they have to?
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
