First off, let me say that I’m never paid to promote anything, so what I say is the gospel according to Rick. Sometimes I join an affiliate program so that maybe someday I’ll see some green, but so far, I haven’t seen a dime so please, know that you can rely on what I’m telling you.
I’ve had a love-hate relationship with RealPlayer since the first time I installed it back in 2004. The RealPlayer installer has always tried to trick or bully the user into adding software that’s even worse than useless, like an app that looks like a popular anti-virus app’s 30 day trial, but is really just a scanner that was outdated by the time it was added to that installer and can’t do anything except prompt the user to purchase the software after the machine is infected.
Did you say you wanted to un-install RealPlayer? That’s funny.
So why bother trying RealPlayer again? The simple truth is that 14 years later and after spending countless hours downloading, installing and learning how to use various commercial and open source applications and plug-ins, there’s nothing that can compete with RealPlayer when it comes to downloading streaming video.
Anyway, I paid the $20 and used it to download a training video I wanted to watch during a long flight without WiFi. I used it to download a ton of videos actually and on several different sites.
The product is called RealDownloader and it’s a part of the RealPlayer Free Download. After installing the free version of RealPlayer, it offered me to upgrade for a one time fee of $19.99 instead of the $39.99 I was going to spend on Real.com, so that’s a win!
Of course, I wound up reflexively pressing a “next” button during install and accidentally installed the Norton Scanner by Symantec Antivirus, which is more useless than a trial version. All it did was suck up CPU cycles doing a scan of my 2TB hard drives, trying to find something that it could scare me into purchasing their anit-virus to get rid of. I found it and uninstalled it, so no hard done, but still.
UDPATE: Remember that $20 I paid? I don’t know what I got for that money because noticing that the words “subscription” next to the purchase on my credit care statement, I logged on to cancel. RealPlayer immediately went into free mode, which allows you to download videos anyway.
In Conclusion
Real.com has demonstrated, yet again, that they have a fine product, but a poor marketing strategy. I wonder if anyone here is wondering why they never really went anywhere, despite being one of the initial entries into the marker and having a product that is still far superior to their competitors, some 20 years later. CEO, I’m looking at you.
