Download free mp3 nokia player

2003 has already been productive for the Seattle technology company RealNetworks. With its partners, it launched two new major services: ABC News Live, a 24/7 online news broadcast, and MLB.TV—a venture with Major League Baseball to Webcast live video of the league's thousands of games. RealNetworks technology also became the de facto delivery mechanism for much of the live, breaking news from the War in Iraq, turning already connected citizens into online junkies hungering for news at all times of day. RealNetworks execs claim a five-fold increase in the amount of audio and video delivered by the company. The war even increased subscriptions to RealNetworks' paid services.

There's no telling how many of those subscribers will stick around as the war winds down, but RealNetworks and its CEO have already proven adept at navigating rough waters. In the past few years, the company joined in the fight against what it perceived to be Microsoft's anticompetitive practices and then watched as the same company launched a major streaming media initiative with Windows Media 9 Series. Microsoft and RealNetworks were once partners.

The broadband wave, swelling to 20 million US homes, could help float the fortunes of streaming media companies, so this seemed like a good time to chat with the man who started it all: RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser.

LU: How has the release of Windows XP impacted RealNetwork's bottom line, technology choices, and direction? RG: Well, you know, basically there's a set of fundamental technology trends out there if you just step back. There's the growth of bandwidth, and that is a fundamentally positive trend for us, because it allows us to deliver better and better experiences.

There is an increase in the range of devices that speak IP, be [they] mobile devices like the new Nokia 3650 phone that you can buy anywhere for $300 bucks [and that has] a full-fledged RealOne player in it, or these network devices that people are using to take MP3 collections and run them all over their houses.

Personally, I just got one of these Vonage IP phones. It's actually pretty cool. It comes with one of these Cisco ATA routers where you just plug an analog handset in.

In terms of technology trends, a new operating system like XP makes a big difference. It makes the PC more stable and robust, so you can be running background tasks as your PC operates effectively as a hub or a server in your environment. Those are positive dimensions of a new operating system.

Because Microsoft seems to sometimes not trust customer choice, they salt XP with all these little gizmos and trap doors to get people to try Microsoft stuff. But the reality is that we're downloading more players than we ever have on a worldwide basis. Whatever the impact is of the courts saying what Microsoft should or shouldn't be doing with Windows XP, we've focused our business on continuing to deliver the best technology. We're increasingly focusing on a combination of enabling free services and keeping an eye on the growth we've seen in our premium services.

So our business is just fine. In terms of market dynamics, just look at the broadband trend and the growth in the wide range of devices. I wouldn't say we're going into an era where PCs are irrelevant, and I certainly wouldn't say that to PC Magazine, but I think we're going into an era where the PC is just one of a number of important devices. It plays a special role because of its programmability and extensibility, but when you look at the totality of what's going on with digital media in the mobile market, in the living room, in the home networking environment, there's more. Our focus is on the totality of that, with the PC as a core part of our heritage that we're continuing to focus on.

As the landscape gets broader, the fact that we have partnerships matters. In fact, I was at the NAB convention last week showing our player running on the PlayStation 2, and running on the new Nokia phones, and on the new Palm Tungsten devices. Think of those three categories: the new game consoles, PDAs, and mobile phones. The leading manufacturers are people who are bundling our player, and the players are not running on a Microsoft operating system. My view is that the opportunities in front of us are very good, and we'll continue to more than hold our own on the PC.

LU: What about the impact of Window Media Player 9 Series? RG: My sense is, it's actually kind of an interesting dynamic. Microsoft, for reasons that I don't understand—but I welcome—seems to be trying to cram a proprietary Microsoft-only agenda down the throat of the entire consumer electronics industry, and the entire mobile industry, and the entire media industry. We had a booth at NAB last week showing our player working on mobile phones that support mobile standards like 3GPP. We also showed our player supporting MP3 and MPEG4 and RealAudio and RealVideo. We give people a choice between the unique advantage of our innovative, award-winning, proprietary codec and support for all the other standards.

If you look at the Microsoft agenda, it's all about the Windows Media 9 codec and why it's better than MPEG4. Microsoft wants its codec to be the thing that the industry embraces. I have to tell you that the harder Microsoft pushes an anti-common-standards agenda, the better it is for us. So I certainly encourage Microsoft to keep pushing its uniquely proprietary agenda. If you're looking for mainstream solutions in the marketplace, you've got two choices. One embraces open standards and in fact is built on an open source foundation—Helix—while the other one is tied to Microsoft operating systems. For the primary formats that they're pushing and the primary formats that they're wrapping with the DRM, the whole agenda is Microsoft.

We're having this conversation in the month of the tenth anniversary of the Web browser. I think history shows that if one company, even a super-powerful company, pushes a proprietary solution and the rest of the industry is behind open standards, open standards win.

LU: What's your take on Microsoft's move into digital cinema and theaters? RG: I think Microsoft focusing on high-end digital movie theaters is great. I think it's a great boon to all the little companies that have been making the old 35-millimeter sprocket projects. It's a pretty low-volume market—but I certainly think it's kind of neat from a technical standpoint. We'll focus on the 100 million phone handsets that Nokia ships every year, or the 50 million PlayStation 2s that are installed. I don't want to say that we'll ignore the market of the 20 digital theaters that are out there capable of playing satellite-delivered movies. You know, we'll probably go after that market eventually, but we'll probably wait till it's a little more of a volume play.

LU: What's the playback quality on these small devices like the Nokia? RG: In terms of, actually, the CPU of those devices, you can get a pretty darned good frame rate if you've got a couple hundred [kilobit] stream. If you look at the image quality on the screen itself, it's pretty darn good. The bigger issue is network bandwidth. We're in this period where we're getting good data rates. I would say we're getting data rates that are like the data rates we got when we launched RealAudio in 1995. You're getting 24 kilobits now on the GPRS networks, and that's in the US. On the CDM networks like Sprint and Verizon, you're probably getting 40 or 50 kilobits depending a little bit on coverage area.

So what that means as a practical matter is that these devices, like the Nokia, are great streaming audio devices. They're very fine video downloading devices, though the streaming video at this point is more of a technology demonstration. That doesn't become a reliably deliverable consumer experience until you have the 3G services. But as I can tell you from the launch of RealNetworks, we spent our first two years just doing streaming audio and didn't even do video until '97. We figured, hey, that doing video that looks more like pop art than a visible video stream isn't doing anybody any good.

We'll have some video download services if you just want to get a movie trailer and watch it, but in terms of streaming content, we'll mostly be doing audio—the stuff we did back in '95 with the PC. So in the everything-old-is-new-again world, we're seeing familiar trends in the mobile market. The carriers are doing the thing that we hoped they would do, which is being super-aggressive on the next-generation image phones and camera phones that are also media-player phones. We're starting the process of educating consumers that mobile media creation and delivery is becoming a very practical reality. It can become part of people's lives, just like PC streaming started to be in '95.