RealAudio circa 1995

If we get into the wayback machine and set it for 1996 we’ll find that it was a time before MP3s, when online video was nearly an oxymoron and broadcast radio was, by-and-large, a healthy and profitable business. Online audio, including live streaming, was a new technology relying on high degrees of compression in order to force the stream over a 56kbps modem connection. If you were listening to online audio back in 1996 it’s most likely you were using RealPlayer to listen to RealAudio.

Although the company behind this platform, RealNetworks, is now considered an also-ran in the world of online media, back in the 90s the company was a pioneer led by CEO Rob Glaser, who suddenly announced his departure from the role this past week.

Rob Glaser

A lot of commentators are now too young to remember those early days of online media, and to them RealNetworks is remembered more for having an increasingly complex player application that seemed to take over your computer and nag you constantly than for being one of the creators of the online media industry. StreamingMedia.com’s Dan Rayburn takes the youngins to task and gives a bit of an historical tribute to Glaser’s accomplishments.

Another forgotten side to Glaser’s and RealNetwork’s biography is how the company provided an early leg up to get a lot of politically progressive radio programs onto the internet. In fact the company was originally named Progressive Networks with one of its goals being to distribute politically progressive content online. Nationally syndicated community radio programs like Pacifica’s Democracy Now! and FAIR’s Counterspin were made available online by the company, using RealAudio. Glaser himself has served on the board of the progressive muck-raking magazine Mother Jones and contributed funding to Democracy Now!, the National Conferences for Media Reform and Indymedia.

RealNetworks is a very different company now, and it’s fair to argue that it made quite a few strategic mistakes that caused its profile in the online media world to suffer. it and founder Glaser deserve props for giving voice to the internet, a medium that was mostly silent before RealAudio. If Glaser had never introduced RealAudio to the world we’d still be listening to radio online, but who knows how much longer it might have taken. Even then, eighteen months was an eternity in internet time. So the next time you fire up Pandora or your favorite live stream from hundreds of miles away, think of Rob Glaser and the original Progressive Networks.

No related posts.

Everybody knows that the trick to getting Internet radio past the early adopter crowd and into the ears of Ma and Pa Kettle means getting into it into cars. Commercial broadcasting seems ready for that to happen. How do we know? The National Association of Broadcasters sent us a profile of Autonet Mobile.

Autonet calls itself the “first wireless internet service provider designed for your car.” It creates a Wi-Fi “hot spot” that pretty much turns your auto into an Internet cafe via a 3g wireless connection. The company says it runs over the “nation’s largest 3g network,” but doesn’t say which one that is . . . presumably Verizon?

Anyway, the car is the Holy Grail, Internet radio wise. The courageous are hooking up iPhones to their FM receivers . But everybody knows that the true mass audience for streaming radio doesn’t come until Mr. and Mrs. Luddite can do it real easy.

Autonet has still has a big problem. It’s expensive. Almost 500 USD a copy and 29 a month for a 1GB plan. 59 for 5GB. And if it runs like 5GB Verizon does on my Blackberry, it may be kinda slow. I have to wait quite a while before the next tune on my Pandora app fires up.

The other sticky wicket the company faces is that it has partnered with Chrysler, which has been sloughling off auto-dealers almost as fast as California is dumping school teachers. But their search engine indicates that plenty of dealers are selling this thing—a whole boatload of them in Los Angeles, for example. And it looks like the outfit has some Toyota dealers as well.

So we’ll see where this goes. In the short run one can expect the pioneer crowd to drive off bridges while surfing the Web on the freeway. In the long run, as prices come down and the economy comes back up, maybe this is one more step towards bringing streaming audio to drive time.

Related posts:

1. The Times Tests In-Car Internet Audio
2. WFMU on the “catch 22″ of Internet streaming
3. Internet radio, AppLink, and the open road