Winamp 5 development started, Winamp to compete with RealOne and Windows Media Player

June 30, 2003

When MP3
became popular most users downloaded Winamp to play their MP3 files and the
software was one of the best known applications on the web. Currently the
software has to compete with many other multimedia players, amongst them are the
big players Windows Media Player and the Real Player. Winamp 3 should have been
the software for everyone to play multi media, but it seems this version has
done no good.
Real player (26 million) and Windows Media Player (43.1 million) have a much larger market share then Winamp (5.5 million) and are using propertariy file formats that require the software to be installed.

Winamp 3 will now likely also become old, as developement of Winamp 5 (2 + 3) has started. Winamp is developed by Nullsoft a company owned by AOL and this company has urged for a new streaming file format (Nullsoft Video/Audio - .nsv, .nsa) to replace the Real format the company is currently licensing.

This summer, AOL plans to release the next version of its online service, currently dubbed AOL 9.0, that will include a new media player , code-named Llama, created by the Nullsoft team. Like previous versions, Llama will include support for playback files encoded in Microsoft and RealNetworks, with the new addition of Apple's QuickTime technology formats.
Unlike previous incarnations, AOL will push for companies to useNullsoft audio and video formats, called NSA and NSV, respectively. Content providers that sign exclusive deals to stream their media on AOL will be required to use Nullsoft's formats.
Nullsoft developers also were the brains behind Ultravox, server software that streams multimedia. Ultravox has been incorporated into Radio@AOL's dial-up and broadband products and is central to AOL's move away from RealNetworks' streaming format.

Still there is a lot unclear about the future of Nullsoft. The main man at Nullsoft Justin Frankel recently announced he wanted to leave the company as AOL pulled the plug of his recent developed small group file sharing software Waste. Read more about this all in this article.

Source: Businessweek.com