One less WMV customer: Verizon V Cast now powered by Real's Helix

RealNetworks announced yesterday that Verizon's V Cast Video service has transitioned over to the Real Helix media delivery system, in a move which puts Real in charge of two major carriers' multimedia platforms.

The short-form video on demand service has transitioned over to the platform upon which Cingular Wireless' Cingular Video was built. That service was later to be renamed "CV" (where "C" now stands for cellular) under the ownership of AT&T.

At the time when Real signed on with Cingular Video, Verizon had enlisted the help of Microsoft for its V Cast Music service. An announcement from Microsoft said, "Verizon Wireless adopted core Windows Media technologies including Windows Media Digital Rights Management (DRM), an enhanced Windows Media Audio Professional (WMA Pro) codec and Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) to provide consumers with unfettered access to V Cast Music content across multiple devices and scenarios."

Late in 2007, however, the DRM'ed model for V Cast Music took a hit when Verizon announced it was incorporating Rhapsody into it, opening access to some of the service's newly DRM-free content.

Prior to that, Real and Microsoft had butted heads over certain DRM compatibility issues in Rhapsody. Real's Senior Vice President Dan Sheeran was quoted as saying, "The fact that one company was making the player, one company was making the software and a third company was making the service meant it was not seamless," and therefore the company was dropping Microsoft's DRM for its own.

Meanwhile, V Cast Video was in a similar situation, using Windows Media technologies and software from PacketVideo. Real's open media platform Helix supports various codecs, and was tailored to fit Verizon's needs.

While Verizon did not mention DRM to Betanews today, a representative said that Real's work is really all behind the scenes; Helix accepts all the content from Verizon's content partners and "gets it ready to go up on V Cast." Since Helix is used to power Rhapsody, this could mean we begin to see video content from the music store coming to V Cast at any time.