Real Networks announced today that they will be adding a new "technology" to their music player/downloader thing that will allow you to play songs downloaded from their service on any number of music players, including the iPod. All I can say is that it sounds like the move of a desparate company.
In my opinion, they have a second rate player. I don't listen to things that have a .rm or .ram extension and I get quite irked when a content provider only uses the Real format. Also, their history of "spyware" has soured the masses. As a Mac user I have been left relatively unscathed by this stuff, but my sympathy does go out to members of the PC community who unwittingly download the RealOne player and then have to subsequently remove the "little apps" it leaves running after the player has stopped.
So the question is, who in their right mind wants to download from them anyway? I live in Canada and can't buy music from the iTunes music store. Even if I could buy music from Real Networks (which I don't think I can), and play it on an iPod, I wouldn't. But apparently they figure if they can get their downloads to play on iPods, then whoa, the flood gates will open. Well, think again. Or maybe they actually think that people are actually concerned about "portability of downloaded music". If people want portability they can download, burn and rip. They should be burning their downloaded music as a backup anyway. So all this Harmony technology does is save the user the "trouble" of doing a work-around, half of which (burning to CD) should be done anyway, to protect your investment. Now some of you will say that you lose quality when you convert between formats and yes you do, to a certain extent. But people that are serious about the quality of the music they listen to don't download music anyway.They buy CDs. Also, if you've listened to any of the other MP3 players out there, sound reproduction isn't as important as the size of the player.
Anyway, I digress. If a company is to be as untrustworthy as to add spyware to their commercial product without telling the end user, it is inexcuseable. NOW, they are reverse engineering a DRM technology to allow their products entry into areas they were previously excluded. It almost sounds to me like they want to be sued. Just wait until Microsoft has a media player on the market and Real reverse engineers their DRM. Bill and Co. would love to see RealNetworks disappear and would love to have a reason to sue THEM for a change. Maybe Apple will sue them and maybe it will eat up RealNetworks 300+ million dollar cash supply litigating the case. Maybe they'll lose and have to fork over a huge cash settlement. Maybe they'll have to declare bankruptcy and then maybe they'll disappear.
That's a lot of maybes, but we can only hope...