San Francisco, CA — (press release excerpt) — RealNetworks, Inc. today announced Helix, the first open, comprehensive platform and community to enable creation of digital media products and applications for any format, operating system or device.

The Helix Platform is based on the industry's most powerful and widely used digital media software technology, with over 1,000 application interfaces. The Helix Community will enable companies, institutions and individual developers to access the Helix Platform source code in order to both enhance the Helix Platform and to build Helix-powered encoder, server and client products. In tandem, the Helix Platform and the Helix Community will provide the standard infrastructure to empower developers, IT companies and CE companies to drive the Internet media industry forward into the future.

Twenty-nine companies and organizations are supporting the Helix Community: BSquare, CollabNet, Cisco, Hitachi, HP, Intel, Lindows, nCUBE, NEC, Network Appliance, Nokia, Openwave, Opera, Oracle, PalmSource, Phoenix Technologies, Pinnacle Systems, Red Hat, Sony Corporation, Speedera, Sprint, ST Microsystems, Sun Microsystems, Symbian, Tao Group, Texas Instruments, TiVO, Volera and Xiph.org Foundation.

RealNetworks also announced today that it has released a family of products built on the Helix Platform, including the Helix Universal Server.

RealNetworks well understands that there are several key challenges faced by the digital media industry. These include: the cost and complexity of supporting multiple formats and architectures; the cost of developing applications in the absence of standardized application interfaces; and the looming increase of these complexities as Internet-delivered media moves beyond the PC to mobile and home devices.

The Helix Platform is the next generation of the software engine that has powered RealNetworks' massively popular server and player products for several years, as well as a set of more than 1,000 application programming interfaces for building media applications. The core Helix DNA engine which has been in development for over 7 years, contains millions of lines of code and is the next generation of the system that has been deployed on hundreds of thousands of servers and millions of PCs worldwide.

Via the Helix Community, developers and technology companies will gain access to millions of lines of source code providing a wide variety of capabilities needed to build digital media products, such as live and on-demand streaming, local and remote playback of digital media, and the ability to add new media formats and data types.

The Helix Community will offer two license structures — the RealNetworks Community Source License (RCSL) or the RealNetworks Public Source License (RPSL). Drafts of both licenses are available today on the Helix Community website. The full Helix DNA source code offering, which provides a complete implementation of over 1000 Helix APIs and source code for the core Helix encoder, server and client, will be licensed under the RCSL. The RCSL is structured to ensure that all products built under the RCSL remain compatible with the Helix interfaces.

The RPSL is structured to provide developers greater flexibility in their use of the source code with the requirement that the products they build from it are also open source. The first Helix DNA component to be available under the RPSL will be the Helix DNA Client. RealNetworks welcomes comments on the RPSL and RCSL from interested parties. After incorporating input from third parties, RealNetworks will submit the RPSL to Open Source Initiative (OSI) for certification as an open source license.

RealNetworks intends to make initial client source code — the Helix DNA Client — available to the Helix Community within 90 days. This will promptly be followed by server and encoder source code by the end of the year. As the inventor of streaming audio and video over the Internet and the leading innovator in this industry, RealNetworks is also licensing to the Helix Community several key patents and pending applications that RealNetworks believes are essential for streaming media content over a network. Participants under the RPSL will enjoy royalty-free patent licenses, and participants under the RCSL will gain patent rights under the royalty schedule associated with the RCSL.

“It's great to see RealNetworks recognizing the power of open source,” said Eric S. Raymond, president of the Open Source Initiative. “They'll get the reliability and security benefits of peer review, and they are contributing an important capability to the Internet infrastructure.”

 
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