Strikes deal with Nokia

By Tony Dennis: Wednesday 09 February 2005, 11:26

IN AN ATTEMPT to tighten its grip on the mobile phone market, Real Networks has struck a deal with leading handset vendor, Nokia. Rather than taking Real`s player as a complete bundle, handset manufacturers like Nokia can now pick and choose the bits of Real`s technology they want to use.

Nokia has already been using Real`s technology for its Series 60 platform so there are currently around 20 devices that have the Real player built in. However, as Real`s director for mobile phone business, Sharon Goldstein, admitted, smartphones aren`t the biggest sector in the mobile phone market.

Real now expects Nokia to standardise on its technology across its entire range. The upshot should be that when mobile phone operators decide to standardise on a method for streaming audio and video to handsets, they will go with Real`s technology.

To date Real has landed a number of the big players amongst the mobile phone operators. The list includes Vodafone and China Unicom. So if a handset vendor wants to be sure its audio and video functions are compatible with Vodafone Live!, for example, it can do so by licensing Real`s technology.

Interestingly one of Real`s major competitors, Packet Video, is also a Real reseller as a result of this new deal. If Real succeeds in this land grab, the biggest loser will obviously be the Beast of Redmond. µ