RealPlayer
RealPlayer (briefly known also as RealOne Player) is a proprietary multi-platform media player by RealNetworks that plays a number of multimedia formats, including MP3, MPEG-4, QuickTime, Windows Media and multiple versions of the format property RealAudio and RealVideo.
The first version of RealPlayer was introduced in April 1995 as RealAudio Player, one of the first media players capable of streaming on the Internet. Version 6 of RealPlayer was called RealPlayer G2; version 9 was called RealOne Player. Free “Basic” versions have been paid, and “Plus” versions with additional features. On Windows, version 9 subsumed the features of the separate program RealJukebox.
RealPlayer 11 for Windows was released in November 2007, and Mac OS X in May 2008. Versions of RealPlayer are also available for Linux, Unix, Palm OS, Windows Mobile and Symbian OS. The program is driven by an underlying open source media engine called Helix.
RealPlayer is a popular streaming media player in the early years of the Internet, but in recent years it has been surpassed in market share of Windows Media Player, and since mid-2007, Apple iTunes.