Behind those handy tools are entire multimedia platforms that an increasing number of government agencies are using to add sound and video to their public Web sites, while augmenting intranets with training videos and other multimedia content. NASA uses RealPlayer software for webcasts on its site, such as one showing the docking of the Progress cargo ship with the International Space Station. Streaming media players, quite simply, are used to play a variety of audio and video files stored on the Web or on disk without requiring you to load the program in which they were created or some other more complicated multimedia program. You click on the file's name or icon, either in your Web browser or PC directory window, and the player pops up automatically to load the file and play it back. The most common type played are streaming media files, so named because they appear in a stream of data that can be played before all the bits have been downloaded.
Players can also play back files that have been saved on disk.
The players can also display still graphics images stored in popular formats such as GIF and Joint Photographic Experts Group. There are only a handful of Web players in the market, and only two are of any real importance to government information technology managers. The undisputed market leader is RealNetworks Inc., whose RealSystem technology includes the widely and freely available RealPlayer, along with RealProducer for creating content and RealServer for serving content. RealNetworks also created the proprietary but widely used RealAudio and RealVideo file formats. Apple Computer Inc. created and actively markets its QuickTime format and related software, but like the company's Macintosh computer, QuickTime is primarily a favorite of graphic artists, publishers, film studios and other Mac users and has little presence in government.