RealPlayer

In April 1995, the Internet was breaking into households worldwide. 56k modems were being deployed and struggled to transmit .wav files, and no one yet imagined being able to listen to music or watch a video without waiting for it to download completely. Rob Glaser, who had just left Microsoft after ten years working on applications and multimedia, saw things differently. He founded RealNetworks with an idea that seemed almost crazy at the time: streaming audio directly from the Internet.

The first RealAudio Player disrupted usage patterns from its release. For the first time, people could listen to audio content via streaming, a word that wasn’t yet part of everyday vocabulary. Success came quickly: three years later, Microsoft integrated the player into Windows 98. This achievement becomes even more impressive when you realize that YouTube wouldn’t appear until ten years later.

The RealNetworks teams worked on two fronts. On one hand, they developed compression techniques that delivered decent quality despite ridiculously low bandwidth. On the other, they invented an original way of combining connection-based and connectionless Internet protocols to smooth out streaming. It was sophisticated tinkering, but it worked.

The company chose a strategy that would later become common: a free player for users, paid servers for those wanting to broadcast. Jim Breyer, from Accel Partners, joined the board of directors and investors poured in. In 1996, against the advice of some team members, RealNetworks launched a premium version of the player. The gamble paid off handsomely: more than three million copies sold, most of them online.

Video arrived in 1997 with RealSystem. Connections remained slow, but Glaser anticipated their improvement. To prove his technology was solid, he partnered with Spike Lee, who directed the first short films designed for the Internet. More than 500,000 people watched them in a month. The message got through.

The software changed names several times over the years—RealAudio, RealOne Player, RealPlayer G2—each version bringing its share of new features. Format conversion, video downloading, playlists, audio extraction... The features piled up. In 2015, the company tried something different with RealTimes, a mobile app for creating video montages from photos. It was a way of keeping up with new usage patterns, while having its core business elsewhere.

Glaser retained from his time at Microsoft a certain vision of convergence between technology and media. He pushed his company toward constant innovation, even at the risk of taking chances. In 2002, RealNetworks launched Helix, a platform capable of streaming any audio or video format. The company even opened part of its source code to developers, to encourage collective improvement of solutions.

RealPlayer transformed our relationship with online media, moving us from tedious downloading to instant streaming. Current platforms owe it a great deal, though few people remember this. The company lasted twenty-five years by constantly adapting.