Hollywood Kicks RealDVD Software Golden Opportunity

The ongoing pressure exerted by Hollywood has forced Internet media delivery software and services provider RealNetworks to give in and permanently interrupt the distribution of its RealDVD software line.

RealNetworks agreed upon paying the settlement of $4.5 million requested by the parties involved in the lawsuit against the company, which included six Hollywood studios, Viacom and the DVD Copy control association, for the charges to be dropped. The settlement finally puts an end to 17 months of litigation, initiated just one day after RealNetworks introduced the RealDVD line into the market back in 2008. RealNetworks will also have to pay compensations to the 2700 customers who purchased the RealDVD software since its official launch.

Filing of the RealDVD trial case caught everyone by surprise, as the software released by the company rigorously respected existing copy protection and anti-piracy measures. Compared to other similar software options back in the day, RealDVD were considered piracy-proof, as they kept the copy protection software embedded on the disc, and any copies generated from RealDVD were locked onto the hard-disk drive they were stored on. Furthermore, this type of protection rendered conversion of RealDVD content into video formats such as DVI, AVI or MPEG-4 virtually impossible.

The great thing about the copy protection measures implemented by RealNetworks is that they managed to corroborate safety of content with a fair level of user flexibility, which benefited both categories of copyright holders and consumers and could have translated into a significant number of sales.

However, content producers blew their chance at speculating these benefits by clinging on to the idea that RealDVD still involved a level of piracy-related risk. Ironically, Hollywood’s reticence over RealDVD led to the destruction of the very solution that could have saved it in today’s increasingly unsettled market climate.

With RealDVD dead and buried, many different alternatives for DVD copying software (referred to as ripping) have penetrated into the market, neither rising up to the quality of the former RealNetworks software. Hollywood has attempted collaborations with various DVD ripping software developers, like the creators of the freeware DVD Shrink, but failed to achieve the expected results.