RealPlayer just announced the capability of downloading videos from any video sharing site to your PC to watch offline. A very cool feature that will be of great interest until people get tired of downloading and managing all the video on their own hard drives.
The only reason you’d want to do that is if you want to watch the videos on an airplane or somewhere else you can’t get connectivity. But most of the time people are on their computers they’re connected so there’s no need for this kind of functionality.
But the real problem is this is RealPlayer which has always been the most bloated media viewing program. It takes forever to load, although their VP claims the new version loads much faster. It also has an overloaded front page that has extraneous stuff you’re never interested in. What really annoys me is when you go to their website they push you to the pay version making the free version close to impossible to find. I haven’t used RealPlayer for years. It’ll take some real convincing to get me to start using it.
Regardless, take a look at this highlight real from Robert Scoble’s interview with RealPlayer’s VP.
