Dawlish News

LAS VEGAS -- RealNetworks Inc. and IBM Corp. plan to team up to offer other companies a method for protecting and distributing digital audio and video.

The partnership will combine IBM's Internet, database and content-management software with RealNetworks' software for disseminating audio and video over the Internet and setting up pay subscription services, RealNetworks said. The companies will market the programs together.

The resulting products, due for availability in the first half of the year, will let users deliver media such as Internet-based television and digital music. The software will simplify the distribution of digital media because businesses won't have to set up their own distribution and sales systems, which has deterred some from pursuing the market, they said.

Over time, the partnership "will make it easier and more cost-effective for the industry as a whole to build and deploy these media services," RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser said yesterday at the Consumer Electronics Show here.

The partnership is meant to give companies that own or control content a new means of distributing it. A media company, for example, could use the service to make its archive of digital video available for purchase over the Internet.

The IBM alliance may bolster RealNetworks' bid to compete with Microsoft, which has named IBM its biggest threat in business software sales. The information-technology market is coalescing into two camps, one led by Microsoft and one by IBM, said Mark Stahlman, an analyst at American Technology Research.

RealNetworks sued Microsoft last month, alleging that it has tried to use its monopoly power in PC operating systems to dominate the digital media market. Glaser didn't mention the suit during his CES speech yesterday.

He urged the film and video industries to craft more reasonable policies for content use. If they don't, he said, they risk the "Napsterization" of their content, referring to the illegal music swapping service. Glaser also demonstrated technologies including the RealPlayer 10 media player, released earlier this week. The company also said yesterday that more than 38 million songs were played by users of its Rhapsody online jukebox in December, a 15 percent increase from November.