When RealNetworks announced earlier this month that it was starting MusicNet, a music subscription service, as a joint venture with three major record labels, Rob Glaser, RealNetworks' CEO, said he would be happy to open the service to the music players of rivals--including Microsoft.
Glaser could afford to make the magnanimous gesture because such a move would only benefit his company. RealNetworks makes money by selling streaming media servers, and it creates demand for those servers by distributing its music player.
Similarly, Microsoft tries to lock users into its own media format with the aim of selling more server operating systems (OSes). What Glaser was offering was an opportunity to allow Microsoft's free media player to serve RealNetworks' content.
Is Microsoft eager to accept Glaser's offer? In short: No. Dave Fester, general manager of the Windows Digital Media Division, gives this carefully worded reply: "We would be happy if RealNetworks embraced Windows Media in the MusicNet service. They have not approached us about this, but we are open to discussing with them the options for including Windows Media support in their service and how it would be implemented." In a swipe at RealNetworks, Fester adds: "It would be of significant mutual benefit for consumers and the industry for RealNetworks to use the best audio quality and security available for digital music distribution."
Welcome to the streaming media format wars. This exchange over MusicNet is only the latest sparring in the battle over proprietary media formats. To lock up the market, RealNetworks and Microsoft do their best to ensure that streaming audio and video content is delivered by their servers, and preferably in their own proprietary formats.
But as RealNetworks and Microsoft slug it out, other companies are complaining that the fight benefits neither content producers nor consumers. The solution, these vendors say, is to adopt the open MPEG-4 format, a new audio and video encoding standard from the International Organisation for Standardization.
Apple Computer, Cisco Systems, Kasenna, Sun Microsystems and other companies formed the Internet Streaming Media Alliance late last year to promote an interoperable specification around MPEG-4. The alliance, to date, has attracted more than 60 participants.
Now that streaming media is becoming big business, alliance members say, it's time for an open standard that will make it more efficient and economical.
"The momentum for MPEG-4 is growing, and the reason is that streaming is coming of age on the Internet and moving beyond the phase of proprietary solutions," says Rob Glidden, Sun's market development manager for broadband and digital media.
Greg Carter, director of business development at Kasenna, concurs. "Microsoft used to have their own email server and client, but that didn't last long," he says. "Proprietary standards don't tend to survive."
While RealNetworks and Microsoft both use the ubiquity of their media players to sell their servers, the companies have different business models for their media operations.
RealNetworks' server software runs on multiple OSes, and the company says it supports multiple streaming formats in RealPlayer, though not Microsoft's format. In any case, non-RealNetworks formats must be recognised by RealNetworks' autoupdate server in order to play on RealPlayer, which ensures that rivals' servers can't deliver content to its player.
Microsoft, on the other hand, uses its media technology to promote its OSes. The company gives its media server software away for free, bundled with copies of Windows NT or Windows 2000, the only OSes it runs on. The company does not support RealNetworks formats. But similar to RealNetworks' products, streaming content that plays on Microsoft's Windows Media Player, which is also bundled free with Windows desktop OSes, must be streamed from Microsoft servers.
Microsoft acknowledges that it uses its media player to promote the sale of Windows NT and Windows 2000 servers. "We are in the business of selling server [OSes], and we do want to protect that business," says Michael Aldridge, lead product manager in Microsoft's digital media division. "We have a very open approach relative to [RealNetworks], but we are in the business of selling servers."
RealNetworks takes a comparable stance. Ben Rotholtz, RealNetworks' general manager of products and systems, suggests that if the company allowed another type of server to stream to its player, that would degrade the user experience. All the advanced capabilities of the RealSystem architecture, he says, are "key to regulate the server-client experience so that they can throttle together."
