Thursday, November 5, 2009
RealNetworks’s Internal Layoff Memo
Earlier today, Kara Swisher reported in BoomTown that RealNetworks would sack four percent of its workforce–70 employees out of its 1,700-person staff. After the jump, the official internal memo from RealNetworks Founder, Chairman and CEO Rob Glaser, breaking the bad news.
Monday, August 24, 2009
You’ve Got to Approve Rhapsody for iPhone, Steve. Don’t Be Pigheaded…Ow! Hey! Stop Hitting Me!
RealNetworks has submitted to Apple a free application that will bring its $15-a-month Rhapsody subscription music service to anyone with an iPhone or iPod touch and an EDGE, 3G, or Wi-Fi connection–assuming it’s approved by Apple, which is anything but a sure thing at this point.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Confirmed: Layoffs at RealNetworks’ Rhapsody
The ax is swinging at Rhapsody America. The subscription music service, a joint venture between RealNetworks and Viacom subsidiary MTV Networks, is sacking nine percent of its employees, mostly in editorial.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Weekend Update, 10/10/08
The best thing that can be said of the week ending Oct. 10, 2008, is this: It’s over.
Marked by panic selling and wet-your-pants fear, it was one of the worst weeks in the financial world’s history–a week that cut the legs out from under Google, beat Yahoo until its market cap bled purple and caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to swing more than one thousand points on an intra-day basis.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
RealDVD Launch Buffering … Buffering …
Looks like RealNetworks’ RealDVD, the company’s new “legal” DVD ripper, is off the market for the foreseeable future. U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel on Tuesday renewed the temporary restraining order barring Real from distributing the software.
Monday, October 6, 2008
Rent. Rip. Restraining Order.
The legal broadside Hollywood lobbed at RealNetworks last week has upset the company’s carefully prepared plans to offer a mainstream means of legally copying DVDs. A judge has issued a temporary ban on sales of Real’s RealDVD software in the wake of a lawsuit brought against it by the Motion Picture Association of America.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
StealDVD? Well, You Were Asking for It…
Just hours after RealNetworks filed a preemptive lawsuit against the major Hollywood studios to avoid outcry over its RealDVD DVD-ripping software, Hollywood responded in kind. The Motion Picture Association of America asked a federal court in Los Angeles for a temporary restraining order to halt the sales of RealDVD, arguing it illegally bypasses DVD copyright protections. Said the MPAA, “RealNetworks’ RealDVD should be called StealDVD.”
Sue. Rent. Rip. Return.
Turns out RealNetworks Inc.’s new DVD ripper RealDVD is as legal as its creator is litigious. Real debuted RealDVD this morning and along with it a preemptive lawsuit against the Hollywood interests that will inevitably attempt to litigate it into oblivion. Brought against the DVD Copy Control Association and a who’s-who of major studios, the suit asks the court to rule that RealDVD complies with the DVD Copy Control Association’s license agreement.
Rent. Rip. Return.
RealNetworks Inc. CEO Rob Glaser calls RealDVD, the company’s new “legal” DVD ripper, “a compelling and very responsible product that gives consumers a way to do something they have always wanted to do.” But really what it’s giving them is a more cumbersome way of doing something that they’ve already been doing for years now with DVD Decrypter, AnyDVD, Handbrake, MacTheRipper, RipIt and the like.
Real to Apple: From Hell’s Heart, I Stab at Thee!
In a 2004 email to Steve Jobs, RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser asked the Apple CEO to consider a “tactical alliance” with his company. License us your Fairplay digital-rights management system, allow our customers to play their digital music collections on the iPod, wrote Glaser, and we’ll make the iPod our primary device for the RealNetworks store and for RealPlayer software.
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About John
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Ethics Statement
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
alt.misc
- Godzilla’s Food, Exercise, and Dream Diary
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183. - Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels’ Generous Offer
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
- The Golden Age of Video
Best video mashup ever.
- I’m not dead yet
A Facebook Memorial
- Pulp Fiction Audio Mix
Wow.
- A world without the Internet
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
- Google Wave Cinema: Pulp Fiction
Excellent.
- Dead Fly Art
Flughumor!
- Happy Birthday Monty Python …
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
- ‘You are being shagged by a rare parrot’
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
