The RealConference of RealPeople
[ No. 32 - June 1999 ]
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What's New
Microsoft sees money! MS has formed a Streaming Media Division
to make sure they extract their fair share from the growing
market in streaming media. The obvious focus here will be
music, radio, news and event applications alongside lucrative
online training and corporate communications. At least now MS
will actually collaborate with the rest of the industry, all
for your benefit of course! The FezGuys figure MS will end up
buying the companies that even appear to know what they're
doing anyway.
<www.microsoft.com>
Got Legacy Content? Don't know what the deuce that means?
Alright: say you have a very private collection of Super 8
movies, 700 in fact, all patiently encoded last year by you as
Quicktime files. Now, you have no idea how to convert these
files into streaming media... or you have no desire to make
the time. Well, help is here! mediaUpgrade.com (an offering
by encoding.com) at , will convert your
.AVI or .WAV files into multiple streaming file types including
MP3, Windows Media Technologies (including version 4.0) and
Real Media (G2 or 5.0) for several bitrates. It's free but
jump quick, maestro, because subscriptions to the site will
begin at $39.00 for 100 MB of transcoding "later in 1999".
Hosting will be sold in packages starting at around $40 per
month. (Prices are determined based on a variety of criteria,
such as time, size of files stored, number of views to the file
and the compelling nature of the content. Ok, we made that
last little bit up, about the content, that is.)
<www.mediaupgrade.com>
The Grateful Dead will allow free downloads of live performance
MP3s. Apparently, as long as fans do not buy or sell, MP3
files of live material "not taken from commercially available
live albums" may be traded freely. The announcement is consistent
with the Dead's long-standing agreement to allow recording of
their shows.
Officially, any web site owner can freely download MP3-encoded
live Dead material. Site owners, however, cannot receive any
revenue from the transaction. That includes not charging for
downloads, not soliciting any advertising, not posting any type
of banner ads and not selling email addresses or other data
about users.
Details aren't available about the Dead's cover versions of
others' songs. The FezGuys assume those won't be free. Sure,
following the trail of licensing revenue for covers isn't the
Dead's responsibility but everyone benefits if they educate
their fans about the issues.
<www.dead.net>
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"...and it's real, so real, so real, so real, woo!" - Friends
Of Distinction
San Francisco, home to more twenty-something, tech-stock
millionaires than Switzerland has punctual trains, hosted the
"Real Conference," at the synchronistically jukebox-shaped
Marriott Hotel over May 5th - 7th, 1999. The conference was
easy to find, housed in the mountain of glass and faux-deco
cornices, but much more difficult to know exactly who it is
we're dealing with. Is the host organization RealAudio? Or
is it RealNetworks, as it's sometimes introduced? What happened
to Progressive Networks? Or maybe it's RealMedia? RealServer?
RealPlayer? RealSystem? Microsoft? If that weren't confusing
enough we found ourselves staring at a sign advertising the
Sunday sermon at a nearby church: "Real Forgiveness." Everything
was starting to unravel until finally the answer was made clear,
with giant letters in the halls of the hotel. "RealNetworks."
Denim shirted RealEmployees skipped hither and yon as your
FezGuys boldly strode the hallways in search if pungent datum.
In large meeting rooms and on the exhibition floor fifty
companies strategically aligned with the RealPeople displayed
their own wares and explained how their stuff dovetails so
neatly with Real's own products and services.
And stuff there was, lots of it. The new RealJukebox (of course
it would be named that!) was unveiled with much fanfare. A
digital music system only for the PC (no other platforms will
be supported before the dreaded Y2K hits), RealJukebox can be
used to rip audio from a CD to your hard drive, sort and manage
encrypted and compressed soundfiles on your computer in a
variety of formats (MP3, RealAudio, Liquid Audio, a2b Music),
encode audio to MP3 or RealAudio formats and even tie into
online purchasing of physical product. The RealJukebox system
records pretty fast, less than half the time it takes to listen
to the music in real time (depending on the speed of your CDROM
drive), so you can have web-ready or portable flash-memory
files prepped for transfer in a jiffy. The system has some
snazzy features to speed up the process too, like automated
artist/album/song searches via CDDB
(<www.cddb.com>), drag and
drop song menus, automatic software updates and, get this: it's
free.
So is this Jukebox thing really relevant? Yup. It neatly
sidesteps all of the hullabaloo in the music business about
SDMI-secure-encrypted-digital-whatever and effectively puts
the tools in the hands of the consumer. The Jukebox allows
home users to convert all their CDs into soundfiles on their
computer. What's happening here is nothing less than a kickstart
for the next wave of consumer acceptance of music on computers.
In order for a product or technology to become accepted it must
be easy to use, relatively cheap and be everywhere. Think of
ATMs. If the desired outcome of the business of music transacted
on the Internet is pay-per-listen then the invisibility of the
process is required. The regular consumer shouldn't have to
think and the process shouldn't require any effort beyond
pressing a button or two. Sorry to say, that's the way it is.
For you content providers a variety of other creation and
distribution plugins in the Real family were announced. Features
present in RealServer 5.0 which were initially missing from
the G2 release have finally been added including SureStream
simulated live encoding (SLTA) and archiving of live SureStream
feeds. Various other stability and performance improvements
were mentioned.
In taking a step back from the hype in the marketplace it
becomes clear that the RealPlayer is becoming more and more
like a browser. RealPlayer G2 now can expand to a larger window
with cycling banners and other multimedia content the manner
of web pages. It makes sense; people linked to your streams
and their listeners will get the exact banner information you
choose to associate with your content. That same information
could be an ad or a link to purchase your CD.
Real hinted at details about a "Janus" project - purported to
be a search service in which all RealMedia content producers
associate their content with keywords and text. End users will
be allowed to search throughout the database for the Real
encoded content of their choice. It sounds like a useful
service. The big question is whether RealNetworks should own
that kind of data. We'll keep an eye on that.
For anyone folding in video content, RealVideo's export function
now supports Quicktime's architecture. This is a sweet little
timesaver. Files can now be exported directly to RealVideo
from your editing software without having to save as unwieldy
AVI or Quicktime files prior to encoding.
Looking around the conference, it's easy to see that RealNetworks
is firmly entrenched and viciously defending their territory.
It's a huge territory, too, with over 60 million registered
RealPlayer users, distribution deals with AOL, Netscape, MSIE,
US Robotics and Creative Labs (to name a few), and an astonishing
(if true) statistic claiming over 300,000 hours of live content
for RealAudio and Video produced each week. With a stated
figure of over 85% of all streaming media content on the Internet
encoded in Real's formats, their marketshare is pretty solid.
Too bad they only see fit to release their product for Windows.
It would be useful for Real to recognize that, though Windows
is the desktop leader, there is a powerful and growing Macintosh
and UNIX (Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, etc...) userbase out here.
"The record label doesn't screw the artist." - Dreamworks
Records exec.
In darkened ballrooms experts expound and attendees, after
ponying up the 800 dollar entrance fee, furiously take notes.
The noisy industrial air-conditioning system agitates pieces
of large glass chandeliers. They bonk and chime against each
other until the room sounds like the ambient audio in a VR
gamescape. All that's missing are Greek columns and enigmatic
control interfaces. We entertain a wild fantasy of stealing
the RealNetworks denim uniform, infiltrating the RealHolodeck
where we hack the code to access the RealBorg. A RealNetworks
demo using deformed frog pictures snaps us back to RealIty.
Upstairs the exhibitioners explain how they're technologically
compliant to RealNetworks' protocol. Everybody wants to ride
this camel in the direction it's going. Intel, Oracle and Sun
rub elbows with Macromedia, Avid and even Liquid Audio.
Everybody wants to show you why stuff works great. AT&T's a2b
music representative, disdaining mere demonstrations, suggests
that attendees are better served if they privately contact the
telecommunications giant. We'll leave it to you to decide what
makes them so different.
The FezGuys say this: RealNetworks is on the ball with plugin
architecture. Used to be we'd hear about the upgrade, find
the download link, wait for the transfer, install the new
version and then try to fit it in with everything else we had
running from the previous version. It was a pain in the ass
to continuously upgrade RealAudio. Real now makes it easier
for partners to design their own plugins. Now if they'd only
get rid of that annoying pop-up window on their web site!
"Another year, another codec." - Steve Mack
Perhaps the most entertaining and useful session was headed by
Steve Mack (a ranking audio engineer for Real). He spoke
passionately and convincingly about optimizing RealMedia audio
and video content. Mr. Mack was clear, succinct and provided
useful information. It was a perfect combination of entertainment
and raw data. And he didn't wear the RealShirt.
Hey, guys. I found my way to www.fezguys.com through EQ Mag
earlier today. I bookmarked it immediately and emailed the URL
of your current MP3 article to some technofile friends. I'm
in a band and we're developing our web presence (mp3.com, The
Orchard, NoiseBox, Amazon, CDNOW, etc.) and we're always looking
for more ways to spread the word. I'd like to get Liquid Audio
clips of the same songs we're currently offering. But from
what I gather - and it's not all that clear - it's going to
cost both to Liquify my tunes and to host them. Can you offer
any advice or cheap alternatives? I suppose I could sign up
with another music provider to host our tunes, but I'd rather
host them on my own server. Keep up the great work -- just
finding subjective writing about music on the Internet by
musicians and FOR musicians is what I'm psyched to have
accomplished today, if nothing else. - Joey/Center Divide
Dear Joey, Kudos to you using all music portals (lingo alert!) to
promote your songs. You join musicians like Chuck D. (of Public Enemy)
who are cutting every (non-exclusive) deal available to reach as many
listeners as possible. If you're already giving away some of your
material via MP3 and RealAudio, carefully consider the usefulness of
adding Liquid Audio (or other formats such as MS Audio 4.0, a2b,
etc...). Are you planning on selling digital tracks and very concerned
about being as secure as possible? If so, the $100 it'll take you to
purchase the Liquifier encoder may be worthwhile. The fee also
includes space for about 5 songs on their servers. But it sounds like
you're already in good shape and don't necessarily need to spend the
money just now. Focus instead on more sites to place your music
(<www.mp3now.com>,
<www.audiodreams.com>, or
<www.musicmatch.com/music/> to name a few). Keep up the good work! - The FezGuys
The FezGuys salute all rejoinders!
