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Multimedia Players

RealOne vs. RealOne Premium

Choose the free RealOne player if you want to have a great-looking multimedia app that lets you watch video, rip digital audio, manage your multimedia library, and try video and audio programs available on the Web.

Choose RealOne Gold if you'd like to be a guinea pig for fee-based online entertainment or you can't get enough of Survivor.

For years, two powerful outfits have battled to play digital video and audio on your PC: Microsoft (with Windows Media Player) and RealNetworks. Today you need both companies' free programs to take advantage of all the audio and video on the Web. But RealNetworks' RealOne application (the successor to RealPlayer) introduces a new option: premium services, such as music downloads and exclusive video, for a monthly fee. For now, though, few users will find this for-pay content worth the cost--especially since the free version offers so much worthy entertainment and information.

RealOne's subscription services replace what Real used to call GoldPass subscriptions, giving you premium content for a monthly fee--kind of like cable TV. The company offers several subscription options: One is a $10 per month membership package with access to premium video, another is a $10 per month music subscription including 100 downloads of music plus 100 music streams in a 30-day period. We looked at the $20-a-month RealOne Gold option, which combines the video and music packages and throws in 125 more music downloads monthly.

The free and subscription services alike use RealOne Player. This nifty all-in-one multimedia application lets you watch video, listen to music, rip CDs into digital files, and manage your music and video collections. I used a beta version of the player to compare RealNetworks' free service and its RealOne Gold subscription service.

The membership service delivers some impressive-looking video content, just not enough of it to justify the $10-per-month fee. I particularly enjoyed the ABC News programs, which include an entire week of Nightline episodes on demand and commercial-free. Survivor addicts can watch bonus footage that didn't make it onto that week's show. The membership service isn't limited to video offerings, either: Sports nuts will love the streaming audio broadcasts of every NBA and Major League Baseball game. The free version is limited to a handy "best of the Web" menu that collects sports, news, and entertainment clips from around the Net.

RealOne Music is RealNetworks' presentation of Musicnet, the digital music service that offers 80,000 songs from several major- and independent-label recording artists. The service's downloads come with severe restrictions, however. You can't burn the tracks to CD or copy them to a portable player. And you're just renting the music: If you don't carry over the songs to the next month (where they would count against that month's 100 total downloads), the tracks become deadweight on your hard drive and won't play.

RealNetworks' music service also gives you access to RealOne Radio, 48 streaming radio stations in an array of genres. The songs are streamed at low bit rates, however, which makes them sound like they're playing on a tinny AM radio. The free player limits you to a directory of free radio sites grouped by genre, but several of these sites sounded great and quickly became part of my daily listening routine.

Subscription-based Web media may be the wave of the future, but until more video content and better music services become available, you're better off saving your dollars and tuning into the Internet's wealth of free content while you still can. --MG