"We're repositioning our server product as a multi-format gateway product rather than a single format server," said Dan Sheeran, vice president of media systems for RealNetworks. "The difference is that there is a category of products that telecommunications service providers and enterprises use to manage digital media, and they include caching and proxy products." Those products have to serve the widest possible variety of formats as well as route streams from one network to another, Sheeran said. RealNetworks in the past has ceded that market to the likes of Cisco Systems, Network Associates and BlueCoat Systems (formerly CacheFlow). "Our new Helix Universal Server is an entry into that category," Sheeran said. "And the pricing and requirements are totally different." RealNetworks' attempt to dodge Microsoft in this way could give the company room to grow, analysts said. "In the absence of a single standard for streaming media, with a three-way battle between the QuickTime-MPEG folks, Microsoft and Real, the ability of a content provider to distribute diverse content on a single server does offer some significant cost savings," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst with Jupiter Research. "It's a question of trying to use your enemy's weapons against it. If Real can stream Windows Media, it obviates the need to install a separate server. You serve everything, and your customer can choose what to play." Tuesday's release will be the first of three that RealNetworks has scheduled. The next two, in December, will reveal source code to the Universal DNA producer, which turns analogue content into a Real stream, and the server, which distributes it over the Internet. Gartenberg predicted that no matter what details RealNetworks announces Tuesday, reaction from the open-source community is bound to be mixed. "We've been seeing an awful lot of interest from that community, and Real's success is going to depend on the efforts it makes to become a real open-source player," Gartenberg said. "But you have different degrees in open-source movement in terms of what's considered acceptable and what's fluff."
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