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Technology Stocks : RealNetworks (NASDAQ:RNWK) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: B. A. Marlow who wrote (2345)	4/5/1999 2:52:00 AM
From: RTev	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5843

If it were designed today exclusively for broadband, it could be a better product. I see your point. But those are problems faced by any transmission media. It looks to me like Real is positioned exactly where they should be right now. Because there are so many users who still get on the net with modems, it strikes me as wise to accept some degradation of high-bandwidth signal in order to provide an adaptive signal that's still usable on low-band. It's similar to the choice that broadcasters made years ago to send their color signals with the relatively bad NTSC standard. It wasn't the best way to send color signals even then (or so I'm told), but it maintained compatibility with older black and white sets -- something that was seen as crucial at the time. The big difference on the net, however, is that we don't have to be stuck with the degraded signal forever, because it's much easier to upgrade the software servers and players used for net media. Regarding MP3, I haven't really listened to much of the streaming stuff. The links I looked at months ago were not working at the moment. I do, however, have a gig or so of MP3 songs (and a few more in AT&T a2b format) on my harddrive that I listen to often. It's much higher fidelity than anything I hear on ReadAudio. MP3's copyright problems, however, are so severe that it seems doomed to be a pirate's favorite and not a lot more. Will streaming MP3 or something else overtake Real? Possibly. But I trust that Real will put up a good fight. They seem to do all of the pieces and do them right for the market at the moment.