Real

I went to a Real Networks presentation today at the W Hotel in Seattle.



Rob Glaser was supposed to come and give a keynote address.



Instead he was there on video.



It was kind of like this, except Glaser didn't smile at awkward times.



It was pretty cool. They passed around a phone that was playing some very high-res video. It was interesting in that the video was postage-stamp sized, like in the old days, except it looked good! The reasons for that, I believe, are:

• In the old days, it was 8-bit video on your PC, but the cell phone was 16-bit "Hi-Color".
• In the old days, it was a jerky 5-7 frames per second, but the cell phone was 30 fps.
• In the old days, the pixels on your monitor were bigger, but the cell phone had really densely packed, beautifully tight pixels.

I was impressed with Real and the quality of the presentation. Usually these kinds of things are horrible, but they stuck to a tight schedule and dumped a lot of information in a short period of time.



The DRM solution I'm working on uses Windows Media, because, well, it's free for use on the Windows platform. Free is a good price.