Realplayer must be losing alot of market share since youtube and all the flash based online video sites became available. Now they’re even using adwords to advertise themselves as a youtube video downloader. It is sad to see that they have to come down to this step. This company has been at the bottom ever since web1.0 boom. They tried open sourcing their media streaming platform, helix. They also support SMIL and SVG, but still they are beatened by Flash’s powerful actionscript and built in vector graphics.

Their business model is just the opposite to Flash. Realaudio makes money from selling players and media servers. Flash makes money from the development tools and give away free players. It is the developers that helped Flash florish. If you go and ask a developer, the chances it that they know how to make a video in flash and have no idea how to make a realaudio video. The cost of purchasing a real streaming server is just too high. The open source version is probably missing alot of commercial features. If there’s a pay-per-use realaudio solution, I might consider using it. Another interesting fact is that alot of handsets are equiped with realplayer and it is the main player for 3G mobile TV. If realaudio cannot secure its position in the mobile market, it is a stock to be sold.