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SMIL's most vocal proponent is currently Real Networks who have built the SMIL functionality into their Real G2 Player software. The Real player is still currently in beta, though a late 1998 release is expected. The current version of the beta is stable enough to work with. Real has tailored the SMIL language to it's popular media types Real Audio and Real Video. In addition, they have added some new media types Real Pix (graphics), Real Text and Real Flash. All these media types are tied together through SMIL and all are streamed for playback in the Real Player. In addition to its own media types, Real contains built in playback for WAV sound files, AVI video files, and AIF sound files. With the addition of an automatically downloaded plug-in, you can also playback MPEG files, though none of these media types stream.

Other companies supporting SMIL are GriNS, a firm from Holland who have also developed a playback engine that more closely conforms to the SMIL standard, but which will probably never receive the distribution of the Real Player. Allaire is also supporting SMIL with a collection of SMIL tags for their popular Homesite HTML Editor. If you'd like to skip creating the code by hand some WYSIWYG editors have started to come to market. The best of these is V-Active for RealSystems G2 from Veon. This product is also in beta, but shows some promise of relieving coders of the day to day grind of creating the code from scratch. One major problem with it is that it will only allow you to export SMIL files, not import files you've previously created by hand. Another tool that should be mentioned for people wishing to put up a simple SMIL presentation fast is the Real G2 Authoring Kit from Real.

While Real is a major player in the market for time-based multimedia delivery and has about a 65% market penetration with their player, it is interesting to note who is NOT supporting the SMIL standard. Netscape, Microsoft and Macromedia have all decided to withhold support from this standard. Netscape is taking a wait and see approach and is very busy with their Mozilla browser project. However, Microsoft, Macromedia and Compaq are currently developing another standard that more closely integrates synchronized multimedia with HTML. This standard is call HTML+TIME and has been proposed to the W3C as a competing standard. The W3C has characterized this standard as "extending SMIL into the browser" so learning SMIL won't be a dead end. You should be able to use these skills later on to produce multimedia that integrates with the browser and its Document Object Model

Introduction to SMIL
SMIL File