2003 has already been productive for the Seattle technology company RealNetworks. With its partners, it launched two new major services: ABC News Live, a 24/7 online news broadcast, and MLB.TV—a venture with Major League Baseball to Webcast live video of the league's thousands of games. RealNetworks technology also became the de facto delivery mechanism for much of the live, breaking news from the War in Iraq, turning already connected citizens into online junkies hungering for news at all times of day. RealNetworks execs claim a five-fold increase in the amount of audio and video delivered by the company. The war even increased subscriptions to RealNetworks' paid services.

There's no telling how many of those subscribers will stick around as the war winds down, but RealNetworks and its CEO have already proven adept at navigating rough waters. In the past few years, the company joined in the fight against what it perceived to be Microsoft's anticompetitive practices and then watched as the same company launched a major streaming media initiative with Windows Media 9 Series. Microsoft and RealNetworks were once partners

The broadband wave, swelling to 20 million US homes, could help float the fortunes of streaming media companies, so this seemed like a good time to chat with the man who started it all: RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser.