I can still remember it as if it was yesterday. A colleague of mine called me into our audio production studio and excitedly proclaimed, "you have to hear this." In front of him was computer hooked up to the Internet. Out of the little speaker came the muffled but intelligible sounds of the first RealAudio.

Back then, the company was known as Progressive Networks. They barely had a Web site and a phone number or even a mailing address was almost impossible to find on it. For a company about to revolutionize the Internet, they liked to play it low key.

Since those early days, the company now named RealNetworks has grown to be the streaming champ. Oh sure, you can talk about how this or that format is better in some way or another than RealNetworks. It might even be true. But spend time on the Web and you will soon realize that RealNetworks has become the de facto standard of streaming media.

RealNetworks is hard to put in a box. Sometimes cunning like Microsoft, sometimes aloof like Apple in its early days, Real must surely know that the battle for streaming dominance is theirs to lose. It might not necessarily be a good place to be for a company that has always seemed to view itself as the underdog to Microsoft.

As a technology, RealMedia is easy to create and implement. Now in version G2, RealMedia has matured and offers an impressive range of solutions for the Web producer. The player handles audio, video, animation, still images, and text. Third party vendor support is strong. The consumers are familiar with and loyal to the brand. And with support for SMIL, Real has boldly staked out new territory in the emerging world of Web multimedia.

While a big fan of RealNetworks, I do have my complaints. Personal experience has shown me that their technical support is sometimes weak. Authoring tools and players for the Macintosh community have often been slow in coming out. Users sometimes complain to me that the company seems indifferent in dealing with its customers. Perhaps these are only growing pains for a company that has a new industry by the tail. But for the most part, Real makes decisions that keeps them on top of the streaming media world.