If Microsoft hadn't stepped outside the law to block his company's path onto the world's computers, says Rob Glaser, he would now be running one of the web's biggest success stories.
"We would have had a good chance of being one of the four or five companies you think of when you think of the internet," Glaser says of his company, RealNetworks, whose seminal online audio software arrived on the scene just as the web was reaching the mainstream in the mid-1990s. "Today, Google is one of them. Amazon is one of them. Facebook is one of them. Twitter has a chance. We were on that trajectory."
Indeed, they were. But then Microsoft tied similar software into its Windows operating system and Internet Explorer browser, and as RealNetworks lost its first-mover advantage, Glaser and company wound up as an anti-trust plaintiff struggling to find a new path onto the world's machines.
After 16 years of highs and lows, Glaser stepped down as CEO of the company in 2010, but now he's back, charting yet another new mission for the company in an effort to reclaim an important spot on the web. Late on Tuesday, Glaser and company introduced what they call RealPlayer Cloud, an online video service that seeks to provide the modern internet with a missing piece: a way of readily moving videos between disparate devices, from Android tablets to iPhones to televisions.
That may seem like a small thing -- "doesn't Instagram do that?" said one voice at WIRED this week -- but Glaser believes RealPlayer Cloud offers an essential service that the giants of the web have yet to provide, and aren't likely to provide, because it seeks to cross corporate boundaries. "We're trying to build something foundational," he says. "We looked around and said: 'What is the one thing we could do that, five years for now, could be as much of a foundation for the future as the RealPlayer was in 1995?"
Yes, we have YouTube and Instagram and Twitter's Vine. But the RealNetworks Cloud Player seeks to give you a simpler and easier means of not only storing and watching videos on the web, but downloading those videos onto your phones and tablets for viewing even when you're offline. It seamlessly converts videos into a format that's compatible with the device you're using right now, thanks to apps that run on Android phones, iPhones, iPads, and Windows PCs.
It also dovetails with televisions, seeking to bridge a gap that so many companies have struggled to conquer. You can, say, instantly grab videos taken with your iPhone and move them onto your Roku-powered TV. At the moment, the company's app is only available for the Roku TV player, but you can also use the RealNetworks service through any web browser.
Though Glaser acknowledges that the giants of the web are equally intent on taking hold of online video, he believes that none of them -- not Google, not Apple, not Amazon, not Facebook -- is interested in spanning disparate devices in the way RealNetworks has done. That case is harder to make with Facebook, which doesn't offer its own devices and, even more than Google, works to provide services across all devices, but Glasser is adamant that Real has found a viable niche.
"We will be the company that puts you across devices with videos," he says, "the way Dropbox does with documents."
