RealNetworks has launched a DRM-free MP3 music store. The Rhapsody MP3 store has music from all four major labels, with over 5 million tracks available for download. Most songs are priced at 99 cents, and most albums cost $9.99. That's about the same price that Apple charges for DRM-free AAC audio files, but a bit more than Amazon MP3 charges for many songs and albums.
All songs will be encoded at 256kbps, and will be playable on any device that can handle MP3 audio. RealNetworks isn't killing off its DRM-restricted music service, but rather, plans to have the two services peacefully coexist. You can pay $12.99 a month to stream unlimited music to your computer, or you can pay per download to save songs that you can play forever.
RealNetworks is also rolling out a service that will let Verizon Wireless customers download music for their handsets. For $15 a month, users will be able to download an unlimited number of songs (with DRM) on a Windows PC and sync those songs with their cellphone. Currently seven handsets are supported, with several more coming soon.
The Rhapsody MP3 store is offering a $10 credit to the first 100,000 customers who purchase an album by July 4th. You need to sign up for an account and fork over your credit card information to qualify. But hey, free music, right?
Several companies that broadcast internet radio streams, including RealNetworks, Yahoo!, and this blog's parent company, AOL owe ASCAP millions of dollars. That's according to a federal court in New York. While the court did not determine the exact amount of money owed, ASCAP estimates that the fees could climb as high as $100 million.
ASCAP stands for the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, and the group represents over 300,000 songwriters who are currently receiving no compensation when their music is streamed by the three media companies. This despite the fact that the radio streams are supported by advertising, which means AOL, RealNetworks and Yahoo! are making at least some money through their streaming music operations.
This whole issue is separate from the dispute between the RIAA and online radio stations last year. The RIAA represents recording artists, while ASCAP covers songwriters.
Yahoo! is preparing to dump its Yahoo! Music Unlimited service and replace it with a partnership with RealNetworks' Rhapsody. A few weeks ago we reported on a rumor that Yahoo! was exploring the idea of launching a DRM-free music store to compete with Apple and Amazon. It looks like the company decided to go another direction.
Both Yahoo! Music Unlimited and Rhapsody allow users to access a large library of on-demand music for a subscription fee. But while Yahoo! has been charging $5.99 to $8.99 per month, Rhapsody charges $12.99 per month. Existing users will have their accounts automatically transferred to Rhapsody, with their music libraries intact. But when you're contract runs out, you'll be charged the higher rate.
Yahoo! and Rhapsody are also exploring collaboration on other projects, including music downloads.
It looks like RealNetworks is expanding its online video game holdings. PaidContent reports that the company best known for its audio and video player is buying Gametrust for under $50 million.
This doesn't mean RealNetworks plans to release the next Halo. Gametrust focuses on casual gaming. You know, the sort of games that you open in a web browser, play for a few minutes, and then move on.
Gametrust's Game Frame platform powers other online gaming portals including MiniClip and Shockwave.
MTV is expected to announce today that it will partner with RealNetworks, merging the two company's online music services.
This probably means the end of MTV's URGE music site, which probably won't affect much of anyone. As far as we can tell, you could count the number of URGE subscribers on one hand. And you might not need all your fingers.
Anyway, URGE had been a partnership between MTV and Microsoft. But Microsoft has been focusing on its Zune Marketplace since launching its iPod competitor. So it makes sense for MTV to partner up with RealNetworks, the company behind the subscription-based Rhapsody music service.
Whether MTV/Rhapsody will make a dent in Apple's market share remains to be seen. But so far Apple has yet to offer a subscription model for iTunes, so it should be interesting to see if Rhapsody's pay a monthly fee for all the music you want model will gain any traction with MTV's brand name and music library.
Verizon Wireless has also signed on to distribute MTV/RealNetworks content to mobile devices.
Real Networks is joining Google's quest to let you interact with online media while you're offline. On the one hand, this seems like technology that would have been great five years ago when fewer people had always-on internet connections. But it would also have been a lot harder to implement these tools back in the era of 56k modems.
At the ongoing LinuxWorld conference, RealNetworks announced that it will be releasing open source software that will allow Linux user to listen to and view audio and video files encoded in Microsoft's proprietary Windows Media formats. Currently Linux users are able to view Windows Media files only through closed-source components, but a deal Real inked with Microsoft after last year's anti-trust settlement paved the way for the announced open source solution, which will be released through Real's Helix Community. Novell joined RealNetworks to announce that it would be bundling the new software with Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, to be released later this year. Real is also planning to bring its Rhapsody music store to Linux, and will possibly be supporting the AAC audio compression format used by Apple.
Google and Mozilla know how to push their software out to the masses. People love their software, and do pretty much anything to get it out there, either through word of mouth, or through distribution deals with the likes of Dell and other major players in the technology industry.
Google and Mozilla have teamed with RealNetworks to distribute their popular software even further. For the past few years Google has already had a partnership with Real for software distribution. Now another multi-year deal was recently struck between the three companies, giving users the option of downloading and installing Firefox, and the Google Toolbar when they are downloading RealPlayer. Hooray for Google and Mozilla! More exposure for these killer applications.
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?
In a hard-fought battle, 
