RealNetworks Ends Download 49-Cent Promo
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RealNetworks Inc. RNWK.O is ending  its 49 cent-per-song music download service but will keep the  promotional prices in place for top 10 songs, the Internet  media and software company said on Thursday.
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MacCentral - RealNetworks will tout its new Windows-only Harmony technology, which allows files from its music store to be played on Apple's iPod, in a series of print, radio and online advertising, the company said in a statement on Tuesday. In addition, Real will hold what it calls the biggest music sale in history selling songs for US&#36;0.49 and albums for &#36;4.99.
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Seattle online media company RealNetworks Inc. on Tuesday said a new campaign to attract subscribers to its music download service will add about a penny per share to its third-quarter net loss.
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I saw an ad in yesterday's NY Times that offered the complete New Yorker magazine archive, including all the cartoons and ads, going back to 1920-something for a bit more than the hard disk would cost. The ad was from J&R, the company that makes the product is Pexagon. $149. Sounds like there might be DRM. I asked for something like this from the music business. A hundred gigs of popular music for $500, all pre-installed on the disk without DRM.  Someone at the New Yorker had this idea too? It's a good one. Bulk content for collector types. Another source of revenue. I want to run my own personal radio station, so having every song of a certain genre or from a certain period makes the diff.
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RealNetworks announced that it has sold 1 million songs in the week since beginning its half-price music promotion. Real dropped song pricing to 49-cents from 99-cents, in part to highlight its Harmony technology, which allows purchased songs to be played on over 70 digital media players including Apple's iPod. But Apple has chastised Real for what it calls "tactics and ethics of a hacker," and says future iPod software updates will likely break compatibility with Harmony.
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If you go by the headlines alone, it sounds like RealNetworks (Nasdaq: RNWK) is about to embark on a heady money-losing venture as it halves prices for its music download service Harmony, looking to take a bite out of Apple ...
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MacCentral - RealNetworks Inc. said on Tuesday that it has sold more than a million songs at its online music store since slashing prices last week as part of a limited-time sale aimed at growing the user base of its new digital media software.
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RealNetworks could lose $2 million from below-cost sales -- but will give its service a huge boost,&quot; says Forrester Research analyst Rebecca Jennings.
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If you want to stop piracy of your programming, why would you take it off legitimate services? The peacock is in for a rude awakening.
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Score one for consumers. Verizon Communications yesterday canceled a five-day-old surcharge on high-speed Internet service after customers complained the company was taking advantage of them by replacing an expiring government tax with a fee of its own.
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(InfoWorld) - On Thursday afternoon at the D: All Things Digital show, RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser demoed a new version of RealPlayer, to be released as a beta in June, that adds the ability to download video that's normally available only as a stream from Web sites and save it to your hard drive for later playback in RealPlayer. There's nothing earth-shaking about that -- utilities like KeepVid and the Firefox extension Video Downloader have offered similar functionality for quite awhile. But Real is aiming for something close to universal compatibility: It says its feature will work with video in Flash, QuickTime, Windows Media, and its own Real formats. And the mere fact that such a widely-used program is offering this capability may make it more mainstream. Sometime after the initial release, Glaser said, it'll follow up with a version that allows you to sync the videos you've downloaded onto an iPod. Walt Mossberg asked Glaser a question that I wondered about instantly myself: Is this all legal? Glaser said that Real respects DRM if it's there and won't let you download copy-protected video. As for non-protected video, he said that Real takes no stance -- it's up to the user to ensure that he or she is using the product for legal purposes. In other words, I'm still not sure whether it's kosher to download and preserve, say, a copyrighted clip from YouTube. But the chances that anyone will come after you if you're only doing it for personal use are presumably slim. Real's implementation of this idea looked slick in the demo: When it finds a video it can save, a little button appears over the video window. Click on it, and you can download. If you're one of those people who thinks of RealPlayer as a program that's hard to download and install and that mucks up your system in various ways, the new version may still be worth investigating: Glaser says getting and using it will be a smoother process, although he didn't provide details. To be fair to Real, its current version is already no more irritating than a heck of a lot of other free applications.
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A consumer advocacy group is blasting RealNetworks for installing adware and other software without properly notifying its users.In a report published Thursday, StopBadware.org faults the latest version of RealPlayer for secretly installing its Rhapsody Player Engine during the RealPlayer installation.&quot;RealPlayer 11 does not disclose that it installs Rhapsody Player Engine, and does not remove the software when RealPlayer is uninstalled,&quot; Stopbadware says in the report.Rhapsody Player Engine is required to access RealNetwork&#39;s online music service. But because users are not told that they have installed the product it could become a liability, using up the computer&#39;s hard-drive space or processing power, or even creating a security risk for consumers if bugs are discovered in Rhapsody, said Maxim Weinstein, StopBadware&#39;s manager.Both RealPlayer 11 and the older RealPlayer 10.5 software are both considered &quot;badware,&quot; the report states.Real Player 10.5 suffers from a different issue, however. Users who download the software without filling out the RealNetworks product registration page end up with a piece of software called Message Center, which then proceeds to deliver ads to the user&#39;s computer. &quot;It&#39;s installing, essentially, a piece of adware without giving users information about that up front,&quot; Weinstein said.RealNetworks spokesman Ryan Luckin said a check-box on the registration page is used to notify users that Message Center would be installed. Users who clicked through the registration page without filling out any information would have the software installed.Although the issue was fixed in version 11 of the player, RealPlayer 10.5 is automatically downloaded via the Firefox browser&#39;s &quot;Missing Plug-in&quot; feature and is still widely used, Weinstein said.Until RealNetworks is up-front with users about what software they&#39;re actually downloading, StopBadware recommends that consumers avoid its media player.Luckin called the Rhapsody issue an oversight. &quot;The fact that when you uninstall RealPlayer we don&#39;t go back and uninstall Rhapsody is an oversight and is something we should address in the future,&quot; he said.A widely used alternative to Apple&#39;s QuickTime and Microsoft&#39;s Windows Media Player, RealPlayer has a history of making invasive changes to users&#39; computers. The Message Center software has come under fire in the past, and in 1999 computer security consultant Richard Smith discovered that the software was quietly sending information to RealNetworks servers.StopBadware&#39;s findings apply only to the Windows versions of RealPlayer&#39;s software, Weinstein said. RealPlayer also runs on other operating systems, including Mac OS X and Linux.Supported with funding from Google, Lenovo and Sun Microsystems, StopBadware evaluates software and warns consumers of products that engage in deceptive behavior, such as tracking user behavior or installing programs without telling consumers.Although RealPlayer 10.5&#39;s Message Center feature may be more noticeable and annoying, Weinstein said Real Networks should fix both problems as soon as possible. &quot;It&#39;s hard to say that one is worse,&quot; he said. &quot;They&#39;re really two sides of the same concept of just not telling users what&#39;s going on.&quot;
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RealNetworks Inc. on Thursday said the three-week cut-rate promotion on its online music store garnered sales of more than 3 million songs.
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Also: Yahoo: DRM-free music by year's end. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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Frontline Communications has gone out of business. A payment of $128 million to proceed with its bidding in government spectrum auctions was due last week.
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RealNetworks says it sold a million songs in the first week of its 49-cent-per-track promotion. The digital-media firm also signed agreements with the University of California at Berkeley and
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RealNetworks, which kicked off the Internet&#39;s first digital music price war by selling songs at half-price, ends the sale on Thursday but will continue selling top-10 singles as 49-cent loss leaders.