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Sonicblue Acquires ReplayTV 29

Posted by timothy from the convergence dept.
rakeshagrawal writes: "This article reports that Sonicblue is buying ReplayTV. It's an interesting step in Sonicblue's transformation. They have quite an array of media devices/software items ranging from audio products, web tablets, home networking and now video. And as for ReplayTV and the PVR industry it means that TiVo may may have even less competition now ... WebNoize has another very interesting article on the acquisition and SonicBlue's overall strategy, but it's a subscriber-only thing :(" (Quick note to WebNoize -- wouldn't you like more people to read this?)
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Sonicblue Acquires ReplayTV More

Sonicblue Acquires ReplayTV

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  • So, as someone already pointed out, Sonicblue != Diamond. S3 bought diamond, took over the rio division, and pretty much killed the graphic and sound card division. fyi.
  • heh-- they have some pretty strange things going on with sound effects and mouseovers... can't decide whether it's better or worse than a straight flashy flash intro.
  • There is a lot of truth to that statement. The idea of technical support of Supra (the company that made modems) before Diamond bought them was much differant than the concept of support offered more recently. Perhaps it should be called 'song and dance' support.

  • RE: Quantum digesting Maxtor (Score:3)

    by Wyatt Earp ( 1029 ) on Saturday February 03, 2001 @02:26PM (#459305)
    Ummm...Quantum didn't buy Maxtor.

    Maxtor merged with Quantum's Hard Disk Unitand all your Quantum (HDD) stock became Maxtor stock.

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/137 27 .html

    "The world's biggest hard disk drive company is to be created, through the takeover of Quantum's HDD business by Maxtor.

    Constructed as a merger, the all-share transaction will see Quantun's HDD stockholders receive 1.52 shares of Maxtor common stock for every one share they hold in Quantum. This values the deal at $2.3 billion.

    The enlarged business, to be named Maxtor
    Corporation, produces more than 50 million hard drives a year."

  • I looked it up and mine is a 7200, but I'm still wondering what bugs you're talking about.

    Before buying my TiVo I did some research. I asked a friend with the 7200 and he told me it was fairly unreliable, losing signal far more offen then his other recievers, and having it stay lost for a time, or locking up for no reason. He said a bunch of other bad things as well, but I don't recall them in any detail. As he reads slashdot, maybe he will come to my aid :-)

    One of the Charlie Chats with the tech people there were a lot of comments about how many people were having trubble with the 7200. That is a pretty big admition from the folks that were selling the thing, so I can only assume it was pretty buggy, or had a pretty nasty UI.

    DISH also is coming out with a new PVR, so I think they didn't like the 7200.

    I also noticed this in another forum:

    Hello!

    Thank you for subscribing to Personal TV. If you have your DISHPlayer(TM) satellite receiver set to record "Friends" on NBC every Thursday night, we have some news for you.

    Instead of its normal 30-minute episodes, "Friends" will be playing 40 minute episodes every Thursday night in February! Here's how to make sure you record all 40 minutes of each episode:

    1. Go to Personal TV.
    2. Choose "Friends" where it is set to record in the future (in blue), not one you have already recorded (in green).
    3. Choose Erase.
    4. From TV Home, choose TV Listings.
    5. Choose "View TV Listings by day and time."
    6. Go to the evening of February 1 and choose the new "Friends" episode on NBC.
    7. Press RECORD twice on your remote control (you should see a "triple red circle" symbol to indicate multiple recordings will occur).

    You are now set up to record the full 40 minutes of "Friends" every Thursday. To go back to the regular 30-minute recording time after February 22, simply repeat the steps above but in step #6, choose the "Friends" episode on the evening of March 1.

    Happy "Friends" viewing!

    Sincerely,

    Your DISHPlayer Team

    As far as TiVo goes you get the extra 40 minutes by havign asked for that show, or a session pass ("all the shows with that name on that chanel"), the only way you get screwed is if you made a manual recording for a specific time range, and in that case I can't blame the thing.

    I rejected the Replay because they have an anti-hacking stance, and I didn't like their record paradime, oh and I heard about bugs on (I think) the Panosonic with macrovision.

    I rejeted the DirecTiVo because it only records stuff off of DirecTV, no off-air signals, and no WB. I'm not going to pay a ton of money to not watch Buffy :-)

    I was pretty leary of the Stand-Alone TiVo just because I'm not thrilled with taking a nice MPEG2 signal, and needlessly turning it into NTSC, and running it through a lower quality MPEG2 codec. But it seemed the least bad, and I got it. I have been quite happy with it. More so then my DVD player.

  • It was debatable whether Diamond had any tech support to begin with.
  • *clap* *clap* *clap* funniest thing I've read all day, but then I'm writing a research paper...
  • Great. So THIS is news, but SonicBlue acquiring empeg wasn't noteworthy either time I posted it. Thanks guys.
  • Re:ReplayTV... (Score:0)
    by CerebusUS (sfrazer_NOSPAM_@va.com) on Saturday February 03, @10:16PM EST (#51)
    (User #21051 Info) http://va.com/

    Sony licenses TiVo tech.

    Moderation Totals:Overrated=1, Total=1.


    ummm.. how can something be overrated when it hasn't been rated yet? oh, wait: Moderators == stupid.
  • Sonicblue is made out of people!
  • However to reduce expenses, it has slashed its workforce by 400 employees, or 40 percent.
  • The press release at Sonicblue's site is here [sonicblue.com].
  • It would be nice if you could look at their website without being bothered by flash plugins all the time.

    Sheesh.
  • According to Wolfe, Sonicblue will support ReplayTV's plans to license its technology to cable providers and other companies. But ReplayTV will eventually come out again with a digital video recorder, he said. Wolfe wouldn't comment further, saying plans were in the early stages. "We haven't even launched a product group within the company yet," he said."

    hmmmm - I wonder how the media moguls will mess with this. There have been a number of articles here and elsewhere trecently about digital coding to prevent recording of specified media events, etc.

    Remember, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that they are NOT out to get you.

  • What about the DishPlayer500 sitting in my entertainment center? It gets service through MS WebTV PersonalTV. Direct from Dish MPEG streaming to hard drive. I've had it since Nov with virtually no problems.

    LetterJ
    Head Geek
  • Even though their big money maker is the Rio, I feel that Sonicblue will make it to this list [fuckedcompany.com]. A stupid name, their "lack of technical support" department, and their ventures that fail will just get them into trouble.
  • what's the scoop on the diamond mako? is this thing any good? (Diamond Mako [diamondmako.com])
  • I looked it up and mine is a 7200, but I'm still wondering what bugs you're talking about.

    LetterJ
    Head Geek
  • If this is the best name the ad guys could come up with they should ask for a refund.

    I can hear the nicknames now, "Sonic Shoe", "Cronic Flu" etc, and the ever favorite for the former "lack of tech support dept" at Diamond/S3:

    Sonic Screw

  • UTV (Score:3)

    by stripes ( 3681 ) on Saturday February 03, 2001 @08:48AM (#459321) Homepage Journal
    it means that TiVo may may have even less competition now

    Well, with Microsoft's second PVR (the buggy DISHPlayer7000 being their first) coming to market this year TiVo has a bit of competition on it's hands still...

    Yes, I know UltimateTV isn't for sale yet, but competing with Microsoft's vapor-releases is harder then competing with it's real products!

    While I don't know what TiVo's offical responce to UTV is, I like to imagine it is stright out of their comercials "Bring it on fat boy!"....

  • empeg + ReplayTV engineers = Goodness... (Score:5)

    by Drakino ( 10965 ) on Saturday February 03, 2001 @12:22PM (#459322) Journal
    Since Slashdot rejected the story, not too many people know that SonicBlue also owns empeg. Just imagine what kinds of on demand video and audio products could come out of SonicBlue now...

    They also bought Sensory Science [sonicblue.com].

    Interesting indeed.

  • Quantim now sells a kit (Score:3)

    by maggard ( 5579 ) <michael@michaelmaggard.com> on Saturday February 03, 2001 @09:26AM (#459323) Homepage Journal
    Quantum (the hard drive folks, just finished digesting Maxtor) have now developed a kit for manufacturers to build their own TiVo-type products. Also Linux based it's the Quantum QuickView [quantum.com]. License it, pop it in your labeled box and you've got yourself a product. Guts supplied by the same folks that supply TiVo & formerly Replay. Before you write them they're only licensing it to big manufacturers and I believe it's a reference implentation, not at all a finished product.

    I expect next Xmas there will be a lot of these in the stores.

  • After buying a video card from Diamond and repeatedly getting shafted by their tech support (first they said they didn't support AMD, then later they said that they didn't feel like supporting my video card anymore), I will not have anything to do with this company if I can help it. Maybe this is off topic, but I feel like I must say it.
  • "Content drives everything we do now, and that means building the infrastructure needed to bring media into the home and manage it," [Sonicblue CTO Andy] Wolfe said. "We had music with our Rio products and interactive data with our Internet appliances. And now we have video, which was always part of our plan."

    Excuse me? You HAD video, but you squandered its potential! I remember about seven years ago when the S3 Vision 868/968 was a decent 2D chip for a video card (I personally owned one, the Number Nine 2MB card, and there's a S3 Vision 868 in my ancient Dell with a P90 in it). However, once 3D came along, S3 balked. The only 3D innovations that S3 developed were S3TC and MeTaL. MeTaL was a proprietary T&L system, and it was superceded by NVidia's implementation. As for S3TC, a lossy texture compression scheme, yes it's implemented in DirectX 8 and OpenGL (including Q3), but why use S3TC when the GeForce can handle raw textures faster than other cards can handle S3TC? For about a month, I thought that Q3 on my GeForce had become corrupt, when Paul Jaquays told me that it was S3TC doing stupid stuff with the textures.

    However, Sonicblue entirely dropped the S3 video chipset part, giving it up entirely. They indirectly admitted that S3 chipsets sucked, support sucked, and there was nothing more to do on the PC side. And so Sonicblue proves the tried-and-true rule of the dot-com economy: "If you can't develop it, acquire it in a company takeover."

  • Sounds like another company that can't decide what to sell. First they coudn't compete in graphics, now the management decided they will compete in interactive TV. If that fails what's next. Sounds like a dot.com that'll probably die this year.
  • Actually they license to Panasonic and they also partner with AT&T. They just decided to stop being a hardware producer, probably because there is not much money in it. The service continues to improve(MyReplayTV.com) and bug fixes still are rolling out so it looks like TiVo will still have "some" competition. Looks like Sony and MicroSoft are upto something as well.
  • Just imagine what kinds of on demand video and audio products could come out of SonicBlue now...

    A ReplayTV with an empeg unit duct taped to it?

  • The source for electronic components buyers.

    http://www.ebnonline.com

    Check it out, for those of you interested in hardware news, board level components, supply chain mgmt., and software exchange services news. P.S: Maggard... thanks for the Quantum Kit info.

  • (Quick note to WebNoize -- wouldn't you like more people to read this?)

    Or more importantly, wouldn't you like to show banner ads to 300,000 people in one day?

    Their loss :)

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