Today AOL Time Warner introduced Broadband Radio@AOL, a broadband radio service built on Yet Another Proprietary Streaming Format. This YAPSF is called “Ultravox”, and was apparently developed in large part by the folks who created Winamp (AOL acquired Nullsoft in 1999).
This isn’t a good sign for AOL, since it reveals to investors that they’ve been wasting money developing proprietary technologies when they could’ve used almost any standard or proprietary streaming format for this product. But this is a huge blow to RealNetworks, as AOL is (was?) one of their most prominant partners. I’ve said for years that RealNetworks’ ultimate fate was to be aquired by AOL, but it looks like AOL doesn’t need them anymore. Does anyone? | Link