Microsoft Battles Real Networks

By Acheron July 18, 2000 5:32 AM

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(ZD)RealPlayer is king. Let's face it. It's being used in over 25 million homes in the US in June alone. But not all of us really like the performance of RP and its streaming content. Enter behemouth Microsoft.

At first, MS Media Player was just a media player, whereas RP had channels and stations that you could tune into -- some really impressive features. Now with the release of MS Media Player 7.0, those features are coming out...along with some other nifty ones. The new version will be fully integrated with Windows Millenium Edition. It will create audio CDs using Adaptec's burner software technology and transfer them to several brands of portable players and pocket PC handheld computers. It also acts as a web radio tuner(like RP) and a jukebox for MP3s where users can create playlists and use customized skins.

Now I've used Microsofts beta release of MP 7, and I really like it. But with it being fully integrated with the OS, I have a problem. This sounds exactly like the old IE 4.0 vs Netscape trick. According to Microsoft, the use of media player is supposed to be transparent to the user. Now that concerns me on what will happen to the people trying to use RealPlayer as their media player of choice. It was a pain to use Netscape, and now if someone wants to use RP, it sounds like their going to go through a world of hurt to stay loyal. Lets hope Microsoft learned something from their court hearings.

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RE: Microsoft Battles Real Networks   reply

Posted by Loath (loath@dtheatre.com) on July 18, 2000 12:26 PM

I never liked RP. It's "streaming" usually ends up dripping. Windows Media player always seemed to work for me. I'm against Monopolies, but if the software is inferior, I'm not going to use it.