RealPlayer used to be an essential application for streaming media content from the web, but you can live without it today. It is still a fully featured media player however, with library, sharing, converting and downloading features.
It is indeed bloated and often intrusive but RealPlayer Gold has a lot of functionality - it can do a hell of a lot from streaming radio and video to burning CD's but it's often slow and cumbersome. Note that RealPlayer Gold is the original version of RealPlayer which went "Gold" after beta testing was finished between versions 10 to 11. After that, confusingly RealPlayer went back to version 1 again with RealPlayer SP although even more confusingly, the latest version is labeled version 12.0.0 in the program's "About" section but version 1.0 on the Real download site.
One of the most annoying aspects is that it can take a while to start whether streaming a clip or just opening a standalone video file. This is because all of the hundreds of extensions and plugins that come pre-installed with it. There are also too many clicks and mouse movements required just to switch to a full-screen playback mode when viewing a clip on a web page. The most recent incarnation RealPlayer SP has done much to solve these problems and also includes ways to share videos on mobile devices as well as download videos that are absent from RealPlayer Gold.
In saying this, RealPlayer Gold isn't bad at all. It's comparable to Windows Media Player 10 as they both have some impressive ways of organizing your music and for me the best feature is the CD burner which is one of the easiest burners I've ever used.
RealPlayer Gold is a bit of a bloated media player, which is slower and less user friendly than the competition
