RealNetworks launches photo and video-sharing app RealTimes aimed at parents, offers storage, creates slideshows
Sean O'Kane / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
RealTimes marks another leg in a rocky turnaround at RealNetworks, which had already cut 10% of its workforce and lost CEO Bob Kimball little more than a year after he took over from founder Rob Glaser. The pivot pairs a parent-focused photo app with continued pushes elsewhere, including the Backstage Technologies acquisition that feeds its GameHouse social-games division.
The feature set — cloud storage plus automatically generated slideshows — lands just before the big platforms make the same capability free and universal, with Facebook's Slideshow movie-maker arriving on iOS in mid-2016 and Snapchat's searchable Memories archive following weeks later.
First-order effects
- Parents gain a single app that stores photos and videos and turns them into shareable slideshows without manual editing — RealNetworks' bet that curation-as-a-service beats raw storage.
- The launch puts RealNetworks in direct feature competition with camera-roll incumbents, since Google Photos, Apple's upcoming iOS 10 Memories, and Facebook were all shipping comparable auto-movie tooling.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's decision to roll out Slideshow specifically to compete with Google Photos and Apple compresses the price floor to zero, leaving RealTimes to justify itself on audience fit rather than features.
- Rivals respond by deepening archives instead of slideshows — Snapchat's searchable camera-roll Memories and, years later, BeReal's Behind-the-Scenes and small-group tools show competitors differentiating on how past moments are stored and shared.
Third-order effects
- If slideshow-making stays a commodity, consumer photo apps stratify by audience — parents, teens, close friends — rather than by capability, squeezing general-purpose challengers between free platform defaults and niche apps.
- For legacy media companies like RealNetworks, the pattern suggests turnarounds succeed only where they pick a demographic the platforms underserve, not where they replicate platform features.
The trend: Automated memory-making is collapsing into a default platform feature, pushing standalone photo apps toward audience-specific niches like family sharing.