Real CEO: Streaming media in its infancy

LOS ANGELES -- RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser said that as successful as his company is, it's only just begun.

In his keynote yesterday at Internet World, Glaser noted that while the Internet streaming-media market doubled in size to $300 million last year, TV networks took in billions of dollars in revenue.

"We are just cracking a couple of percent of the whole opportunity," said Glaser. "We're just in the toddler's stage of this market compared to the potential of this market."

Glaser said that truly busting open the market would require universal broadband to the home and "deep personalization" of content.

"In the long term, the right way for people to build their media based services is to make their content available as widely as possible," Glaser said.

Glaser demonstrated the evolution of streaming media with several examples of video news reports, songs and even a movie preview of "Austin Powers, the Spy that Shagged Me," using different levels of bandwidth. Glaser also promised that bandwidth would increase but said that it's a slow process as "it doesn't get cheaper to dig up a street and put fiber optics in."

"Yes, it has taken longer than we all like, but this really is coming," he said.

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