Real might have started life as a simple player, but over the years it has grown and developed in new and varied ways. Some have been successful and others less so. But today, it's board will be patting themselves on the back, because they have just picked up a nice lump of change. KitGuru checks the cache to discover more about the cash.

It's hard to see the Real logo without thinking back to the early days of pirated music and porno downloads. It was a time when Nutscrape was one of the more popular browsers and Real was seen as a bit of a rebel's choice. It certainly seemed to get plenty of support from the underground network of developers across the globe in terms of codecs etc.

Once it began the move toward monitising its inventions, it hit the same issues as Nutscrape. While its founders might try and argue the superiority of its underlying technology – the world was loading up on Windows with Internet Explorer and Media Player free of charge.

Over the years, Nutscrape largely went the way of the dodo, while Real fought tooth and nail to stay important and to carry on inventing new stuff and charging people for content. Considering it had to do this in a very tough/competitive market, it actually did quite well. Even today, having a good version of Real installed on your PC brings actual benefits – specifically with its ability to save YouTube files on your PC and do simple conversions from one video format to another – perfect when you want to watch your new film on your iPad.

Back in January, Intel and real shook hands on a $120m deal that moves a ton of patents etc over to the semiconductor giant and today, as we type, 120 million of those wonderful dollar things are making their way to Real's account.

KitGuru says: Intel is amazing technologies like they are going out of fashion. Operating systems, anti-virus programs and now media players…  What is Paul Otellini  planning we wonders.

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