RealPlayer was the coolest thing I'd ever seen when it came out in the mid 90s. It was the first streaming music player, as far as I know. Of course they later became corrupted by the advertising dark side, like every other internet company. But they were cool for a time. This was also before everyone decided that the browser would be the only internet platform.
Yup. I remember in 97(?) when I was able to be an early adopter of @home (before the excite merger), listening to "music on the internet" with realplayer on my PowerMac 7100.
It was positively mind blowing.
Almost equivalent to seeing 240x180 video playing on a CD-ROM.
I remember it being great at the time and trying to work out how to save .rm streams and being completely flummoxed by it due to lack of knowledge and skills. I also remember that they redesigned it and it was a slow mess that attempted to be the media player for all media formats on my Windows machine, which was disappointing. It could have been that I had a really really slow computer (I was poor) but I remember it being painful to use, particularly when I just wanted to listen to MP3s (Winamp 2.0 was the best for that, although I did used to encode at 128kbps yuck yuck I must have been deaf).
Not only was it an awesome streaming client, I found it to be pretty sweet client for ripping/burning CDs at that time. It was sad to see it fall, but once Winamp got a bit more polished I never looked back.
It also supported SMIL with real-time buffering of content from independent sources. You could create a small XML file that dynamically and seamlessly streamed video excerpts from multiple servers, appearing as one stream.
Hehe, SMIL, the early days of web defined standards. Our university tried to enforce its usage but it never caught up. Multimedia streaming at that time was still an oddity. Never be too early.
There was an early streaming video application for Windows 3.1 that predated RealPlayer. It had some radio stations playing music as well as CNBC. Can't remember the name now. Even earlier was MBone for X11 although that was never more than experimental at the time.
