Although now significantly less prominent, RealAudio is celebrating its 30th anniversary—a true pioneer in the world of streaming audio.
Let’s go back to April 3, 1995: the era of Windows 95, the early days of consumer internet access, and dial-up modems with speeds of 28.8 kbps being the norm. Despite that extremely limited bandwidth, RealAudio managed to develop a system that allowed users to play live audio streams. On the user side, all it took was installing the RealPlayer—and the audio experience could begin.
RealPlayer itself would later become somewhat controversial in newer versions, and eventually faded more and more into the background. That was due in part to the rapid increase in internet speeds and the rise of competing formats that allowed for high-quality audio and video streaming.
Today, we listen to lossless high-res audio via various music streaming services and watch 4K movies from an even larger number of video platforms. RealAudio hasn’t been able to capitalize much on this new golden age, but it still exists—with mobile apps, no less.
All in all, RealAudio is a key part of digital audio and computer history, and its brand name certainly deserves its place in the history books.