1.5 Million Served

Following positive reviews by The Wall Street Journal, CrunchGear and many others, people have been asking me how RealPlayer is doing after one week on the market.  Here’s what I know:

-   Average daily downloads of the new product from realplayer.com are up 40 percent compared to the average daily number from a month ago, and

-   Probably more exciting, people have downloaded more than 1.5 million videos using RealPlayer SP in just one week.  (We can tell when people make a download because the download status box gets updated from a Web site with suggestions for places to download more video, and we can see how many times that page gets hit, just like any Web site.  We can’t see who’s downloading what, so enjoy watching that Cat on the Roomba all you want.)

In case you missed it, RealPlayer SP, announced last Wednesday, lets people download Web video and transfer it to mobile phones and portable devices in just two clicks.  You can also share it with your friends with built-in Twitter and Facebook links.

Although we have no way of knowing what is being downloaded or by whom, it is interesting to watch what people are sharing via Twitter and Facebook.  Michael Jackson news and video is among the most popular.   The election protests in Iran are another hot topic, with one person encouraging others on Twitter to download protest videos before they get taken down.  Documentaries are popular as are, of course, the ever-present funny (or not) videos of peoples’ cats.

What videos do you like?  Share them in the comments below or on Twitter (#realplayer).

Bill Hankes
VP, Corporate Communications