Real Media

So, I am taking an online course this semester because I needed to pick up an extra elective at the last minute. Over my collegiate career, I have found that unless an online course is your only responsibility, it never works out as well as you would think it would. At least for me, that is.

Anyway, in my online course I was required to view National Public Radio's website and listen to a documentary on Jonestown. When I got to the website, I was unable to listen to the piece because it was a .SMIL formatted file instead .HTML. At that point I was very confused. I had come to believe that I had all the necessary add-ons and plug-ins necessary to make it through normal internet usership. I, of course, was wrong.

The type of format, .SMIL is something that is only read by Real Media programs. I had never heard of Real Media and did some research to see if it was safe to download to my computer.

Real Media is almost identical to Windows Media Player in the way that it works with audio and video files. According to the sources that I read, they believed that Real Media and programs like it that use .SMIL will completely take over by 2020.

The thing that strikes me about this statement is that if the internet and all of its video, audio, and text files had to change from .HTML to .SMIL, then that would be a lot of work.
I may be a little hesitant to change, but I do not see the great upgrade from .HTML to .SMIL. I just see all of the work that programmers will have to do when changing the format of all the files in cyberspace.