iTunes Jumps Real Player For The First Time In History!

Apple's iTunes was always in a close battle with its counterpart from RealNetworks, that one being RealPlayer, of course. Despite their rather uninspired proprietary media format, RealNetworks managed to hang on in there and keep the second position on the media streaming market, after Microsoft's Windows Media Player, but things have just changed...

According to recent studies, the situation looks like this: Windows Media Player - 76 million, iTunes - 36 million, and RealPlayer - 27 million. Obviously, we are talking about the number of users each of these players has...

It's pretty clear that Media Player's growth has one main reason, and that is the fact that Microsoft had the (very good, I must admit) idea of making it a part of its Windows operating systems, but how did iTunes managed to get a steady growth?

Well, let's think a bit - now they have movie rentals, and Apple TV "Take 2" is going to arrive pretty soon, an event that may boost iTunes usage even higher, and we shouldn't forget about the inspired move Apple made when decided to make QuickTime and iTunes available for the Windows platform too (that's an ancient story, anyway, but I think it is worth being mentioned here).

Other than the above, I must confess that I used RealPlayer only when I had to, and that didn't happen too often. Also, the existence of completely ad-free programs such as RealAlternative had its part in slowly pushing back RealPlayer's popularity...

At last, let's congratulate Apple for this success and hope that, maybe, one day in the future... you know what I am thinking about, so I don't have to say more!