RealOne Player

» see real.com/realone as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

realone player showed up on my windows machine in 2002 as an automatic update to the realplayer i already had installed on a ttnet connection in ankara. i did not download it on purpose. one day realplayer launched a different splash screen and a different toolbar and the program was now called realone. the only thing that actually changed for me was a new pane on the side promoting goldpass.

realnetworks announced the brand on 4 december 2001 as the result of merging realplayer with realjukebox in one installer. the pitch was a single subscription that bundled the player, the mp3 library, the music streams, and the news clips into one product. by january 2002 the goldpass tier had about 500,000 paying subscribers. the unified client became the front door to realone music and later to realone rhapsody after the listen.com acquisition closed in august 2003.

the brand lived about 26 months. realplayer 10 shipped 7 january 2004 and the realone name disappeared from the installer. the product was the same lineage but the name reverted. version 10 was the cleanup release that quietly dropped a piece of branding the marketing team had spent two years building.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the merger was for ~

the realnetworks problem in 2001 was that realplayer was free and realjukebox was free and the company needed a subscription business attached to both. goldpass had launched the year before as the paid tier on realplayer plus. by folding everything into realone the company could put one subscription prompt in front of every user of either product. it worked enough to put a half-million paying subscribers on the books inside a quarter.

the helix media platform announcement in july 2002 was meant to make realone the universal player for any format including windows media. the platform survived. the brand it shipped under did not.

~ why the name died ~

realplayer was a recognizable noun by 2001. realone was a marketing word that did not mean anything outside the company. by late 2003 the support pages and the download links and the press releases had drifted back toward saying realplayer. version 10 made it official.

realone superpass survived as a subscription brand a while longer, then quietly retired into the same word as goldpass and rhapsody one over the following years. the goldpass-realone-superpass-rhapsody lineage is one of the busier brand chains in the consumer software graveyard.

~ what is left ~

realplayer 10 lived on through realplayer 11 in november 2007 and a slow decline after that. the goldpass-superpass-rhapsody money kept the lights on at realnetworks until the 2003 listen.com purchase pivoted the company toward rhapsody as the real product. the realone brand left no merchandise, no nostalgia, no t-shirts. just a strip of toolbar that landed on millions of windows machines for two years and then went away.

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