After making the RealAudio the most popular audio streaming system, two firms - Progressive Networks and Iterated Systems introduced RealVideo, mainly based of the winner transportation techniques of the previous product. Another RealAudio's secret of success is Dolby Labs AC3 compression.

The RealAudio was the first product to deliver stereo sound over standard dial-up lines.
Buffering and so called "robust UDP" technology coped better with real-world Internet environment then all other products. Over ISDN lines, the quality of the sound is comparable to the CD. For a media creator, encoders give many options concerning not only bandwidths, but also the content, in order to achieve best possible quality over standard dial-up lines.

Feature known as RealAudio Bandwidth Negotiation allows RealAudio server to detect the bandwidth between the client and the server, and to serve the highest quality sound possible at the given connection speed. However, the content provider MUST encode the same source file in several different RealAudio files, which differ in quality and bandwidth needed for their real- time download.

Both RealAudio and RealVideo systems use advanced features which put them in the leading position in the Internet streaming multimedia field. Two most important are:

• Splitter technology - it allows RealAudio/Video server to receive a stream from other server, which enables the content provider to build up the world wide network of servers in a topology that saves bandwidth.
• Clustering - if overloaded, Real Audio/Video server automatically distributes the stream to other cluster members.

Interaction between Web and RA systems

Spliters and multicasting