RealNetworks banks on RealTimes Stories photos app to write a happy ending
NEW YORK — In the mid-1990s, a lifetime ago in the Internet age, RealNetworks was a pioneer.
Online streaming of audio and video may be commonplace nowadays, but that certainly wasn't so in 1995 when RealNetworks launched what was to become the RealPlayer media app.
The ensuing years haven't been all that kind to RealNetworks, though the Seattle-based company has managed to stay afloat despite sinking revenue.
Since 2013, founder Rob Glaser, now in his second stint as RealNetworks' CEO, has been trying to engineer a turnaround via a new approach, RealPlayer Cloud, an online video-sharing service that currently claims about 11.5 million registered users.
On Tuesday, RealPlayer Cloud gets a new name, RealTimes, and an expanded set of features that Glaser hopes will appeal in particular to parents who take tons of pictures and videos of the kids. In other words, practically every mom and dad with a smartphone.
"This is the most significant product launch since I came back," Glaser says.
RealNetwork's mission is simple but not exactly novel — use the RealTimes app to lift your photos and videos off the camera roll and turn them into brief RealTime Stories, essentially slideshows and video montages backed up with a soundtrack. Such stories can be easily shared on Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp, with other destinations including YouTube promised in the near future.
As an added bonus, you get some online storage to back up your photos online. Content is organized by date and location. You can share albums with friends who are notified when new photos and videos are added.
You're probably thinking that there are already numerous ways to accomplish such feats, either through third-party apps or via the software built into your devices. And you'd be correct.
In producing video montages, RealTimes' approach is to largely automate the process, getting you in Glaser's estimation about 80% of the way to a finished story. The app grabs pictures from a particular event or trip — Junior's Little League game, the family picnic — and suggests them as stories. But rather than choose every photo or video from a given event or place for the montage, the app eliminates duplicates or blurry photos.
The story may be fine, as is. Otherwise, it's left to you to manually add pictures that were omitted, delete others or to alter the soundtrack; some royalty-free music tracks are supplied with the app.
You can also change titles, apply transitions and some Instagram-like filters, and rearrange the order of the images and videos.
The company is going with a free and tiered pricing model. Under the free plan, stories are limited to 30 seconds in length and can be played back and streamed in standard resolution. You can pick among five transitions and filters, and 10 tracks of music. You get 2 gigabytes of free storage and an additional 5GB if you upload your pictures to the cloud. You can hold 1,000 photos.
A step-up $4.99 a month ($49.99 a year) plan ups the storage to 25GB, lets you play back or stream in high definition, and lets you exploit all available transitions and filters. You can increase the duration of a story to three minutes and can choose from 100 tracks of music. You can store 10,000 pictures.
You'll also have the option to remove a RealTimes' "watermark" from the bottom right corner of a video.
The $9.99 a month ($99.99 a year) plan adds unlimited storage, the ability to choose from all the tracks in your library, and lets you produce a story of any duration.
If you're not under a subscription plan, you can also lengthen a video story on a case-by-case basis by paying 99 cents each time.
The RealTimes app is available as a free download on Android phones and tablets, the iPhone and iPad, Windows PCs, Roku TV players, and Chromecast. It's promised soon on Macs, Amazon's Fire Phone, Fire TV, Kindle Fire, and on the Xbox One.
I do have a few quibbles. The biggest: I wish the app were a little smarter about how it chooses the photos used in a story.
For example, I took pictures of my son while attending a recent game at Yankee Stadium. Before entering the ballpark I snapped a picture of a sign in the parking lot so that I could remember where I left my car after the game. The picture seemed out of place in the RealStories montage that the app produced — not that it was difficult to remove.
RealTimes isn't groundbreaking. But I can recommend the app and service to non-techie parents seeking an easy way to make photo and video memories come alive. Whether it proves to be successful enough to help RealNetworks rebound is a story that still needs to unfold.
Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow @edbaig on Twitter
The bottom line
RealTimes from RealNetworks
www.realnetworks.com; Free, with tiered pricing options up to $9.99 a month or $99.99 year.
Pro. A simple automated process for turning photos and videos into video montages. Has free online storage options.
Con. Could be smarter about some of the photos that are chosen for montages. You can't yet share to YouTube or certain other online destinations.