Thursday, June 23, 2005

Jeff Louella : The rise and fall of a revolutionary company

Jeff Louella : The rise and fall of a revolutionary company I've seen a lot of people talking about Jeff's commentary on the death of Real, and he brings up some good points. The place where he loses me is that in one sentence he says "there are too many media players fighting to play my media streams" and then folllows it up with a statement that there is a market opportunity for yet another media player.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

What I meant by that statement was that there is a market for an application that would be "THE" application. One application that will play Windows Media, Real, and QuickTime seamlessly. An application that is extensible enough to cover all the new codec’s and standardizes all other applications and protocols. This way I just need 1 application to play all the formats and I can wipe off the 5 inferior ones I have now.

jherskowitz said...

Jeff, thanks for the clarification. I'd be curious to know which of the 5 players you have you think come closest to being the uber-player....

jherskowitz said...

Of course the slippery slope is that the constant proliferation of new CODECs (e.g. Monkey, FLAC, etc.) creates an ongoing arms race for the media player providers. As soon as a new format or DRM scheme appears, than there is an opportunity for a new media player to pop up that really supports all video, image and audio formats. Can there every really "be only one"?