Real Media - does not "play fair"

As I said on the previous page, the biggest drawback with using Real Media is the company - the product itself is excellent. Here's why:

Way back in the mid-90's, Real Media (back then it was Real Audio) was introduced to assist with downloading music from websites, which took an extremely long amount of time, especially with the dial-up connections of the day. So their product would stream the data, where the song would start to play BEFORE it had finished downloading, and it would stream the data to the player at a speed consistent with that user's connection speed. Great idea, worked pretty well for the most part, and the Real Audio players for all of the visitors were free. They only made a profit for the Real Audio encoder, software which they sold to the web developers to create the Real Audio. The main reason for it to be worthwhile for a web developer to buy this encoder, was that they claimed that the Real Audio players were and always would be 100% free and simple for visitors to download. And for the first few years, that was completely true. But, only a few years later, they started making it more and more difficult for visitors to actually find the free players on their website, and instead kept increasingly putting up their "premium" players for purchase in front of the free players, making it very diffcult for the visitors to find, download and install. So in essence, they were cheating all the developers whom bought their encoders with the promise that it would be easy for the visitors to use. Many visitors couldn't find the hidden free players, and thus they were unable to hear the developer's music.

Now the situation is even worse, the free player is so hidden, that it requires the visitor to navigate through several screens, then even still they have to deliberately refuse several default options where they would need to pay, just to finally get to the free player download. Then if all that ain't bad enough, while you are downloading the free player, they have pop-up advertising displayed on your download screen, and since that it takes additional bandwidth for the advertising, it makes the download time take even longer to actually get that player!!! (And remember, the whole purpose of streaming media was to assist with downloading time, and instead they are deliberately making it worse, just so they can make even more money from advertisers!) So for any of those whom do not already have the real player installed, you can email me I and I will give you a direct link to download it without all their hassles .(BTW - They don't want anyone to do what I'm offering, instead they want us to send all the visitors to their website, so they can try to fleece them out of their money. Well since they don't play fair, I'm not going to honor their rules).