The market shares of video player software have changed drastically in recent years and now it is the Flash Player system that seems to have taken over the industry.

Still there are 4 video systems on the market, but it seems, that only one is on the winning lane.

- Video Player Software

Flash Player
The market leader has almost wiped out the entire competition with the rise of youtube, myspace and all the other video upload sites that are using it.

An interesting free Flash player solution comes from flowplayer.org where a whole suite of features does convince users and video producers.

Real Player
The former market leader once had the NFL, CNN, BBC and other world class websites using their real player software.

But meanwhile huge management mistakes have shifted the company into the role of a big time loser since users can no longer find the free player version which is also heavily polluted with aggressive advertising, malware and e-mail harvesting methods.

Apart from that, the streaming quality and handling features of the real encoder and player are still convincing, but ugly marketers seem to destroy their own core strength and opportunities.

A clean alternative to the Real Player is offered at free-codecs.com.

Windows Media Player
Microsoft has somehow powered itself into the market, but in the end only a few small websites have implemented the media player system due to large disadvantages like slow connection speed and difficulties with embedding videos into websites.

Quicktime
only very few sites have adapted to Quicktime where streaming is still a problem for providers.

Users prefer fast starting streams and Apple has expected them to wait for lengthy downloads. Also the amount of data has always been too big so that Quicktime never got going despite it`s very good picture quality.