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Thursday, May 31, 2007

Bombshell from RealNetworks: Rip/Save/Burn "All" Online Video Fomats with New Player...Clips from YouTube and Yahoo Are Easily Downloaded

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Just a few minutes ago at the "D" conference in Carlsbad, California, RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser made a bombshell announcement about a new product from RealNetworks.

The company will soon provide a free downloadable video player that allows users to save and organize video files in all major formats including Flash, QuickTime, RealMedia and Window Media.

Some files, which have digital rights management protection, DRM, cannot be "ripped," but a vast majority can. The huge news here is that Flash .flv files can be saved. Flash has very little in the way of DRM and it is the most widespread format in online video -- it's used by an enormous range of publishers and video sharing sites including YouTube, Google, Yahoo! Brightcove, AOL and The New York Times.

These downloaded files are organized by the new player and reside in program directories which are not restricted to the user. In-stream ads are downloaded along with the clips. The company has a premium service that allows users to create DVD's from their collections.

Ben Rotholtz of RealNetworks came by the Beet.TV studios earlier this month for a demo and explanation. You will see him "ripping" Yahoo! and YouTube files. The player installs a little rollover command on most major browsers. Just run your cursor over the videos you want, hit save and the file is saved to a directory.

In the demo, you will see that the download is blocked from sites with DRM protection. In this demo, you will see that NBC does not permit downloading.

The new player will be available next month at RealPlayer.

For a great perspective on this development, check out Robert Scoble who also has video interview. Kevin Delaney of The Wall Street Journal just posted a story.

Update: Not sure how this news will play with video sharing sites, but early reaction from Mike Hudack of Blip.TV is quite enthusiastic. He just told me:

“This is very exciting news and I consider it a great thing. Unlike blip.tv, most video sites out there are built as walled gardens and work very hard to prevent people from downloading the video they can view on the Web. Real’s new product blows this practice out of the water, and it’ll be very interesting to see how these walled gardens respond.”

Update 6/1: Brightcove CEO blasts new player as "illegal piracy."

--- Andy Plesser

RealNetworks, Flash , Rob Glaser, Mike Hudack, Ben Rotholtz, Online Video

Posted on 05/31/2007 at 2:30 PM
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Comments

Amazing I watch a lot of TV shows and always find myself missing my favorite TV shows and movies because of school/work. I use http://10starmovies.com to see missing tv shows and movies, we are talking about the much-awaited movie Shorts. A kids movie that even the adults would love to watch, Shorts is actually about children’s most outrageous fantasies.

Posted by: melina corbett | Monday, August 24, 2009 at 08:40 AM

very good and good

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Posted by: John | Sunday, May 04, 2008 at 01:50 PM

nice blog

Posted by: horses | Friday, March 28, 2008 at 08:50 PM

Props to Real (and Ben) for trying. You do have some catching up to do (but the fact that you can save an unprotected FLV from a publicly accessible URL does not seem to be such a bombshell to me).

Posted by: Stefan Richter | Friday, June 01, 2007 at 04:21 PM

This is Ben Rotholtz, General Manager of Web Services and Syndication

We hope we can win back your trust: We have taken a very different course with the new RealPlayer to create a streamlined consumer friendly experience.

The installation sequence for the new RealPlayer has been completely overhauled and reduced to three screens (one of which is a license agreement).

RealPlayer no longer tries to take media-types that are associated with another player. The user is not opt'ed into the message center (it's off by default and not even part of the installation seqeunce).

The core engine of the new RealPlayer has been dramatically overhauled. It's signficantly faster and video performance has been tuned.

Change is difficult. There's a lot of legacy that's not easy to shed and perhaps we'll never be able to do enough to win back your confidence. We won't stop trying. Thanks for the unvarnished feedback.

Posted by: Ben Rotholtz | Friday, June 01, 2007 at 12:36 PM

This really makes very little difference to me. Real Networks long ago passed the threshold of bugginess, bloat, and system resource hogging that I consider to be acceptable. It's the first thing that I uninstall from all new workstations both at home and at the office. Until I see some compelling evidence that a decade of decay has been erased, I won't change my mind. This is especially true given the fact that there are plenty of free utilities that accomplish video capture from Youtube and other sources.

Posted by: Brad | Thursday, May 31, 2007 at 06:42 PM

WTF? Why is this a bombshell?

After you put down the pop-poms, this is going to look like Real's other recent at breaking into closed systems, like.....

Oh yeah, we already forgot about them.

Posted by: James L | Thursday, May 31, 2007 at 06:24 PM

"It's very important to us that consumers just have a great unimpeded experience."

So, a completely new approach, then. :p

Posted by: se7en | Thursday, May 31, 2007 at 04:29 PM