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

To: soup who wrote (2957)	4/28/1999 4:03:00 PM
From: Roger Bass	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5843

Soup, glad to have you on the thread, perhaps you can answer a couple of queries on Apple's position here. First, an assertion: most of the streaming video on the web in future will be served from (a) major 'broadcast' portals and (b) large scale media hosting services, ie services offering an easy way for small providers to get into streaming media. (a) seems obvious, but let me explain why I assert (b). Media serving is a classic scenario where demand tends to be 'spiky'. A single server may be OK for just handling a few users now and again. But delivering reasonable quality of service for larger (and spiky) audiences requires the ability to actively manage loads for multiple video streams across multiple servers. Most small and medium sized web media players will have less hassle and deliver a better quality experience using such a service. So now my questions: 1. Does Apple have any customers at all for their hardware in these kinds of large scale media-server facilities? 2. Is there any realistic reason to believe that they will gain share in this hardware market? 3. For Unix or NT based facilities, given that those facilities need to support Real, with the client base that's out there, is the business case to support adding QT4? Best regards, Roger Bass.