Real Player exposed

I was chuffed, yes chuffed I say, to read on Wired News that I'm not the only one that thinks Real Player is a pain in the butt to get, install and a veritable nuisance after its installed. According to their article radio stations who use Real Audio to stream their shows are besiged by listeners complaining about the Real Player program required to hear their programmes online. Real insisted on making the free Real Player program extremely difficult to download and then made it almost viral in it behavior after installation with frequent message center popups and default hijacking of all media types.

As radio stations started investigating Microsofts Windows specific WMP format, its was apparently the nationally famous Car Talk show that finally issued the ultimatum to Real Player and got them to actually make downloading Real Player reasonably straightforward. However, I can report that as of today Real Player 10 "Gold" while only requiring two clicks to download, still has default install behavior that hijacks all audio content types from your current media player, and insists on installing its irritating and irrelevant "Message Center".

Unofrtunately Real Player is I'm afraid, still a necessary evil, since its the only widely used cross platform audio streaming platform. I wish this would change so that radio stations had something other than WMP and RP to choose from. Some kind soul needs to create good quality open source audio streaming software and players that we can all use and be done with the Real Player vs. Windows Media Player battle.