RealNetworks has retooled its flagship video player RealPlayer, and made is more controversial: it will now allow users to download online videos from other sites, burn them to DVD and CD, and share video links. Most major formats are supported, including Real, Windows Media, Flash, and Quicktime, the company says. The sites include YouTube and others…and this would ONLY be applied to non-DRM content. It would be interesting to see the reactions of the industry to this one, though.
Glaser presenting it at D: We are like a video recorder. If there is an ad in the video, we download it along with the video, so that is the way we support the video model.
Also, the company will, later this year, allow video to be transcoded in the right format to be able to download on to iPod video.
Details in release.