RealPlayer: TiVo for Web Video

Joseph Laszlo | June 01, 2007, 02:50 PM

There's a new version of the venerable RealPlayer in town, and it's a little different. Given that the days when someone needed RealPlayer because, say, most Web video was encoded exclusively with it, are behind us, player makers need new tricks to spur downloads. Real's is interesting.

Real includes a browser plug-in that pops up by most Web video, including embedded Flash video, and says "download this video." So that you can, say, build an archive of every episode of "Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager," which you can then burn to VCD or even (if you splurge on RealPlayerPlus) DVD.

Real's supporting all the major codecs with this, mostly natively. It's intriguing; on the one hand, I kind of feel like the ephermerality of Web video means why bother downloading it (and "Chad" aside, how much is really worth keeping?) On the other hand, if this capability becomes widespread, who knows what interesting uses people will think of for it.

Be interesting, too, to see media companies' reaction to this; while Real won't download any video tagged with DRM, this would seem to facilitate, um, borrowing content without asking, and using it for one's own purposes.