New York , NY January 1962
Barbara Glaser gave birth to Robert Denis Glaser.

Growing up in a middle class Yonkers neighborhood Rob Glaser's youth seems to mirror his adult professional life.  At a very young age it was obvious this was one smart kid. He was a math whiz with an incredible memory for facts and figures - and a life long passion for the game of baseball. Not far from his childhood Yonkers home was Yankee Stadium. Lacking athletic ability to play the game, "Chubby" showed his enthusiasm for the game by memorizing at least 3/4 of all the facts and figures of the Encyclopedia of Baseball.

 If you at age 7, you had asked Rob what he wanted to be when he grew up,. his answer would have been to be the sports announcer for the Mets or Yankees. Today he is the co-owner of Seattle Mariners baseball team, and has an exclusive deal with MLB to deliver the all the games via the Internet. He also owns part of the Pro Bowlers Association. Another hobby.

With a stereotypical combination of smarts and ability that other kids love to hate, his pre-teen years persona was that of a clean cut "geeky" kid. He started learning about computers when he was in first grade. Keep in mind this was the early 70's and the personal computer was not exactly a common concept at that time. Like anyone who "Thinks Differently" ( To take an Apple slogan) Rob Glazer was labeled as weird.

He had to learn quickly to use his smarts to deal with and outwit the bullies.  A skill he would find useful later in life.

At age 12 Rob started his own school radio station and near single handedly wired up the entire high school he attended. It was a precursor of bigger things to come in his adult life. After graduating from Yale with a B.A. and an M.A. in Economics and a B.S. in Computer Science, Rob considered going to graduate school, working for Hewlett-Packard Co., or signing on with a little-known software company in Seattle called Microsoft. His friends never expected him to choose Microsoft, but Glaser told them about MS-DOS, the software program Microsoft made to run every PC. Every time a personal computer is sold, Microsoft makes money, Glaser said.

"He saw how important it could be," college friend Peter Rubin says. Glaser packed his Toyota and headed west. This was 1983 and Rob Glaser just had his 21st birthday.

Glaser was the archetypal Microsoft employee: supersmart and hyperaggressive. Glaser quickly became a star. He worked on  Microsoft Word, moved to the company's networking group, and eventually became vice-president of the multimedia systems group. He quickly worked his way up the ranks. Bill Gates even threw his bachelor party.

After 10 years at Microsoft,  Glaser walked away from the company a wealthy man, took some time off, and then in 1994 founded Progressive Networks which became Real Networks. 

Mr. Glaser says he was inspired after seeing an early form of Netscape called Mosaic. "I downloaded Mosaic and, immediately, all the light bulbs went off. It was like, hey, this is how we're going to do interactive television, but instead of doing it on a brand new infrastructure, we're going to start with the world that I knew very well." 

In April of 1995 Real Networks released their first player. Rob Glaser can and should be credited as " The man who broke the sound barrier on the Internet". Even if Apple & Microsoft would argue the point, clearly no single person has done more to bring audio and video to the Internet than Rob Glaser. With a passion & fascination with the convergence of media and technology, Glaser has been on a tightrope each step of the way, attempting to placate and at the same time outpace the other players.

Courtesy of BigCharts.Com

In November of 1997 Real Networks became a publicly traded company.

Real Player G2 was released in 1998. Adjusted for splits, Real Networks once traded as high as 90.00 a share.( Today it hovers around 6 bucks.) The new Real Player G2 player interface offered users one-button access to more than 60 leading media content providers, and alerted users whenever new media content or breaking news stories were available. Other features to the Real G2 RealPlayer included: An intuitive, Web-based interface that allows users to customize their selections and choose from leading Internet broadcast sites, including ABC, FOX, CNN, ESPN, CBS SportsLine, Wall Street Journal, CNET, Sony, and Warner.

Through new channels and preset capabilities, RealPlayer and RealPlayer Plus™ G2 directly connected users to the widest range of quality, brand-name, live and on-demand programming on the Internet. New RealPlayer Plus featured numerous extras not available with the "Free" player, including a graphic equalizer and video quality controls, which provided users with complete control over the quality of their media experience on the Web.

Many figured Real would dry up in the dot com bust that sent Internet stocks into a free fall. Especially in November of 1998  when Microsoft announced it would be unloading their 3.3 million shares of RNWK and accelerating the development of it's own media player which would "compete" with Real Player. Real Networks estimates Microsoft made about $100 million on its investment.

Real versus Microsoft

Rob Glaser accused the software giant of intentionally disabling its products and maintained that the Real's streaming media player no longer worked once Microsoft's own player was installed. Microsoft disputed the claim all along and blamed the problems on a defect in a beta version of the RealPlayer.

I recall one day using a Windows based PC and a question was presented when launching Windows Media Player. It asked if I would like Windows Media Player to be my "Default" player. I said no. Then after restarting the PC later that day, I discovered the Windows OS automatically reset the Windows Media Player as my default player. I remember chuckling at that "innovation" wondering why they had even bothered to ask.

At that time you could select Real Player as your "default player" but then every time you restarted the PC Windows would reset itself as the "factory default player". There was not much in the way of content for Windows Media back then so finally I just removed Windows Media completely which almost magically fixed all the " compatibility issues" I was having with Real Player at that time. To be fair I was having a lot of issues with that hunk of junk PC and one day I just got fed up and hurled it into the swimming pool. I went and bought a Mac and have never looked back.

The folks at the Real camp continued to improve upon their player enjoying a strong lead over Windows Media & Quicktime. In November of 1999 Real Player 7 was introduced. Followed by Real Player 8 in May of 2000. Which offered full screen VHS quality playback.

Unlike Microsoft & Apple who have other sources of revenue streams to fuel their media players and engage in the "Streaming Video Wars" Real Networks doesn't build Macs or rule the Windows world. But Rob Glaser has a knack for seeing the future and capitalizing on opportunities before others do. In December of 2001 Real One Player and the all new Real One subscription service was launched. By April 2003 paying subscribers passed the 1 million mark.

Later renamed Gold Pass, Real Networks has built a rapidly growing subscription business on the Web that has generated a revenue stream that has finally turned Real Networks into a profitable company. During the peak of the "Napsterization of music", it was Glaser who had the idea--and the skills--to broker a deal with three fiercely competitive recording labels to launch MusicNet.com, an AOL only music service.

This isn't about technology. It's about politics.

Money on this scale - combined with the likelihood that a chunk of all "hard media" sales and rentals, currently worth about $60 billion annually, will shift to digital download - has drawn a diverse pack of competitors: tech giants IBM and AT&T, the five major record companies, Cable companies and of course, Microsoft. Rob Glaser realized if Real Networks was to survive he had to find some friends in the neighborhood if he was to continue to compete with Microsoft. Especially after Bill Gates pledged a few billion dollars to win the "streaming video wars" at about the time Windows released Windows Media 9.

In July of 2002 Real Networks officially announced Helix and made a move to invite the open source community to improve upon Real Networks technology. For the uninformed Helix is like Linux in that the code is open source and anyone is free to improve upon it.. The Helix community helped to further the development of DRM ( Digital Rights Management) a key component previously lacking in Real Player. Rob also had joined up with the MPEG4 Forum. Though MPEG4 is based on Quicktime architecture, the idea behind MPEG4 is to create a way to universally encode for all players. In the future .mp4 files will play using Quicktime or Real Player. MP4 promises also to do for video what mp3 did for music.

Imagine in the early days of TV if CBS, NBC and ABC didn't agree on how to encode television broadcasts. You would of had to buy three different TV sets to watch all the shows. Obviously one universal standard is what is needed to propel Internet distributed video.

While Microsoft is a token member of the MPEG4 movement http://www.mpegif.org/mpegif/index.php, they are not supporting .mp4 in Windows Media Player. Microsoft wants the whole pie. Rob Glaser however understands that if you can increase the size of the pie the slices are bigger for everyone. Sure Rob Glaser wants to remain a leader in digital media delivery, but nobody has ever called him a monopolist, and not one company has ever cried foul or raised anti competitive practice concerns against Real Networks.

Another thing Rob Glaser understands and that perhaps Microsoft is still blind too, is that the future of Streaming Media isn't about the players anyway - it is about the content, and who gets to deliver that content. True Real Networks has been accused of "spying on it's customers" but that whole concept and hype is warped . Real Networks doesn't care what YOU watch, it cares what most people are watching. By gathering this data they are better able to serve you and provide the most popular content.

One challenge for Rob Glaser is to develop a new Real Producer for Macs. While Apple may have a comparatively small user base, much of the Internet video content is created on Macs. When it comes to video, editing & encoding Apples computers and software are by far superior to the PC.  Content creators have switched from OS9 to X and the new G-5 computers don't come with OS9. To create Real Video files Mac users are still using Real Producer 8.5. Even Cleaner 6 for the Mac requires content creators to work back in OS9.

Streaming Magazine recently called Glaser "The Most Powerful Man in Streaming ", saying "Glaser and his company pioneered the concept of streaming media, and RealAudio and RealVideo have transcended the limit of simple brand names to become a generic term for the entire streaming concept." Glaser has long been intrigued with the nexus of media, computing and communication. As television and radio transition from a broadcast to an online medium, Glaser envisions turning the Internet into the next mass medium.

It is this vision Glaser has committed his life to. While Real Networks has made him a billionaire , he still shows up at the office, puts in 60 hour weeks & flies all over US and the world as "The Streaming Media Evangelist" trying to convince the content owners to release some content. You have to admire the man's commitment. If I were a billionaire I'd be relaxing on a beach in Tahiti.

Quietly without much fanfare during the height of the busy Christmas season on Dec 18th Real Networks filed a lawsuit against Microsoft. Claiming violations of federal and state antitrust laws. The complaint alleges that Microsoft has pursued a broad course of predatory conduct over a period of years by abusing its monopoly power, resulting in substantial lost revenue and business for RealNetworks. The complaint was filed in federal court in San Jose, California and alleges that Microsoft has illegally used its monopoly power to restrict competition, limit consumer choice and attempt to monopolize the growing field of digital media. Real Networks is seeking 1 Billion in damages.
                                                                                

Read More about the Lawsuit on Streaming Media.Com


I don't believe winning or loosing this case will make or break Real Networks. But if I were the Judge I would give Real Networks something better than a billion dollars. He could end the streaming video wars by ruling to force Microsoft to adopt the MPEG4 STANDARD like EVERYBODY else in the industry has agreed to.MPEG = Motion Pictures Experts Group - The same Standards body that brought you MPEG2 which is widely used for today's television. MPEG4 is the next generation of digital media .If you look at the Microsoft agenda, it's all about the Windows Media 9 codec and why it's better than MPEG4. Microsoft wants its codec to be the thing that the industry embraces. The harder Microsoft pushes an anti-common-standards agenda, the better it is for Real Networks.

 If you're looking for mainstream solutions in the marketplace, you've got two choices. One embraces open standards and in fact is built on an open source foundation — Helix — while the other one is tied to Microsoft operating systems. History shows that if one company, even a super-powerful company, pushes a proprietary solution and the rest of the industry is behind open standards, open standards win.

Recently Real Networks announced RealAudio 10 & RealVideo 10