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Within the Apple world, the combination of AirPlay on a Mac, iPhone, or iPad and Apple TV works well. It is also difficult, after all these years, to get video from a PC, phone, or tablet to your television display. With RealPlayer Cloud, you can share any video just by emailing a link. So unless you are careful about formats, there’s no guarantee that a video uploaded to a shared Dropbox folder will actually play on your friend’s device. Most mobile devices cannot handle Flash, while Android lacks a built-in QuickTime player. Each video type, such as Apple QuickTime or Adobe Flash requires specific software, called a codec, to play. While Dropbox, SkyDrive and the like make it easy enough to share files among all your devices or those of your friends and relations, video poses special challenges. You can also download videos for off-line viewing. The service automatically handles transcoding and makes sure that the video is streamed in the correct format for the device. Log on to your account with any of those devices or a Roku box attached to your TV, and you can watch your video. If you had a video on your Windows PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, or Android device, you simply upload it to to the RealPlayer Cloud. It can be done, but it’s a pain and different devices generally call for different methods.Įnter RealPlayer Cloud, a drop-dead simple cloud based sharing service. But it is not so easy to watch a video you edited on your computer on the device of your choice, let alone share it with a group of family or friends.
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YouTube and Facebook make it simple to share your videos with the world. But it may have found a route back to relevance by filling a a need for personal video sharing that has curiously been ignored by other players. Real has had a tough few years, surviving on its mobile entertainment and games businesses and its venerable RealPlayer for PCs. But the Seattle-based company was once a major media pioneer, inventing postage-stamp-sized streaming video back in the days of dial-up connections and creating Rhapsody, the first subscription music service. Younger internet users may never have heard of Real Networks.
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