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Sonicblue files for Chap 11
An anonymous reader writes "ReplayTV and Rio maker Sonicblue is a goner, filing for bankruptcy and selling their assets to D&M, the Japanese parent company of Denon and Marantz.
No word what will happen to all those Replay users out there -- that $140 deal on Amazon isn't looking so hot now, is it?"
Well, now that SonicBlue seems to be out of the picture, now the only major retailer of PVR technology is TiVO. Unless you count UltimateTV, which I guess is still being sold, but I haven't seen ads or any indication of Microsoft pushing it for a long time.
Tivo COULD do well by this, since if support for ReplayTV drops dead, users of ReplayTV will still want SOME kind of PVR (and I'm not talking about those who are willing to waste days and weeks hacking the box, here)...or, could make it harder on them, since the MPAA and their relatives now only have one big company to focus on.
The next business quarter will probably be a turning point for PVR technology. TiVO has a better chance of surviving if those that are orphaned by ReplayTV move over to it. If they don't, TiVO instead will be 'hanging on' for some time, and its fate (and ability to manage lawsuits like the one ReplayTV got, DMCA-wise) will be a lot more uncertain.
It means theyre fucked up, and need some time to gather their maoney and pay off debts. Its not good, but its not the end.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
In the good ole US of A, chapter 11 is reorganization. This gives a the company protection from creditors to get its house in order. Companies often come out of chapter 11.
Chapter 7 is liquidation. This company, as they say, is no more. This is for companies that are looking for an organized sell-off of assets.
More info at 411bankruptcy.com.
So SonicBlue is not necessarily gone for good. However, if they are selling off their major product lines, I wonder how they plan to achieve profitability.
Funny - I just got two Rio 600 MP3 players (32 Mb and 64Mb models) given to me in the last two days by two different people. They don't have enough memory to hold many songs, but they seem to do what they do well enough, and they're automatically recognized by iTunes.
I purchased a Replay TV 4040 when it was bleeding edge. Now what? Am I screwed? Seems like if they stop providing the guide, with no way to get the software to use another guide they are not providing the service I paid for! Can we sue? I'm sure there will be tons of unhappy people if they just turn it off.
Yes, you can sue. You can always sue. You will not win, because bankruptcy stays suits against the debtor. I see no reason a court would lift the automatic stay under these circumstances.
Essentially, you are in the position of an unsecured creditor of Sonic Blue. In other words, YF, with some emphasis on the "F".
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
It's going to take a while; because of the massive investment in "infrastructure" set up for TiVo with regard to its database of programming information, from which the guide gets its data and from which season passes, wish lists, thumbs up/down and autonomous recordings flow.
The roll-your-own crowd seems to think a free replacement for TiVo is as simple as putting together some inexpensive hardware and throwing one's luck to the wind in hopes that guide data can be pulled from the net. However, after using one for a few months now, I can say that the value added by the TiVo service is not something that can be inexpensively provided by goodwill alone.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Oh well, others are making good competitive products, so I guess there's no reason really to be sad to see them go.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
If you bought it with your credit card, talk to your credit card company. You should be able to get a full refund, with the possible exception of the service fee for the month for which you did have service.
PenguiNet: the (shareware) Windows SSH client
Doesn't look to me like TiVo needs a savior.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Certainly Tivo already does this - don't know about Replay as I've never seen or used one. Tivo will allow you to manually set time and channel and record however.
The thing is, there's no value in that to me. The whole value of Tivo is in the data it provides, not the hardware and not even the software (although I like the interface). Without the data, nicely categorised with descriptions etc., the Tivo isn't much better than a VCR to me. With the data however, it has proved a god-send.
That's the real service - the provision of accurate and categorised data. That's why you pay your subscription.
Cheers,
Ian
Replay users will stil be able to set up their recordings manually.
You can use the Replay, at least the 4000 series, as an advanced VCR. You can manually tell your Replay to record channel 5 at 12pm everyday or just on Thursdays. It's slightly kludgy to name the recordings, but not difficult.
If someone wants a VCR, why wouldn't they by a VCR? It astounds me that someone would buy a PVR if all they were interested in was a VCR.
I can answer that, as I've wanted one, but have no interest in the "we'll find what you like" service.
1) Pause live TV.
By the time we get our daugher to bed, it is almost always 8:15 - 8:20. If I tape the show, I then do something else for 40 minutes, as I don't want to watch the end of the show without seeing the beginning. With a PVR, I could start it at 8:20 and be caught up with live tv by 9:00
2) Random access to shows on tape.
I record mostly to timeshift. I don't need to archive. I'm not horribly worried about quality (as long as it's viewable). So when I tape, I tend to re-use a few tapes over and over until they wear out. If I tape something, but don't get to it right away I may need to tape something else. I'll either put it on the same tape (after the first show) or get a new tape. Now I either have multiple tapes laying around, or I end up watching my shows in "reverse order" so that I can re-use the tape if need be without writing over unwatched programs.
With a PVR I could put stuff in and watch it when I want to watch it.
--
I'd still like one, but they're just expensive, and I have no interest in paying a monthly fee. Until last month, I was only paying for very basic cable. I don't need a service to automatically look at all the programming when I only have 5 channels of anything worthwhile to worry about.
If only you could get a PVR that just worked, and was programmable like a VCR, with Showview or some other listings, and could pause live TV?
Sure. Are you willing to pay $500 for it? That's how much the hardware costs. Ooops... forgot. You're not spreading the software development costs out over a monthly subscription... up that to $750 then.
and allow you to interface it to a PC for archiving of old shows
Oh... up it to $1000. We're gonna get our pants sued off.
Wait... what am I saying? Why not just buy a PC with an ATI All-in-wonder card?
Because the interface sucks rocks. Actually, sucking rocks would be an improvement on the interface and recording quality.
Frankly, the monthly fees aren't really for the guide data - yeah, some of the costs go to that and to the dialup/web servers to support the customer base, but the vast majority covers development costs and day-to-day operations. If you're willing to have a PVR that will never have a software update, never have new features, and has to rely on the amazingly crappy show data that is broadcast in sideband (ala VCRPlus+) then you could get a standalone PVR. But it's going to be around $500 to cover the hardware and development.
Or I can sell you one for $400, then charge you ~$10/month or a largish lifetime fee, provide software updates, new features, oh, and better guide data. As business models go, I'll take the second one.
You're right about the giants coming though -- most cable operators are looking to provide PVR style functionality soon. But wow are they crippled. Of course, it may not matter - the boxes are cheap (usually free) and the monthly fee just becomes another line item on a $100/mo cable bill. I keep hoping that TiVo, at least, will be able to fight a lot of these guys on a patent basis, but it seems unlikely.
I cannot speak for the ReplayTV but the Rio500 didn't hold up anywhere near as well as I had hoped. If I shake my Rio500 a little, it loses an internal connection and reboots. Furthermore, the customer service for the Rio500 is god-awful. I went looking for drivers one day after I reformatted my machine. That day, they had 'temporarily disabled' access to the drivers, not even posting the old ones on their site. They didn't correct this for almost a week, during which my Rio was useless.
Also, there was always a hassle getting the Rio Audio Manager (the _worst_ designed user-interface for managing large collections of MP3s I have ever seen) to reenable the MP3-ripping functionality I should have had. In the end, I went out and bought a copy of another piece of software to rip MP3s and to transfer to the Rio (I forget its name at the moment, it's the popular Windows one).
Still, I suppose I still use my Rio500. I use it to listen to audible.com audio content and it does a great job of that. For my MP3s, though, I have since upgraded to the Creative Nomad Jukebox 3. I cannot get it to hook up to Linux yet but apart from that, it is great.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
actually
they opened up the RioReciever to projects like jreceiver.sourceforge.net.
so they have a history of helping out folks with 'defunct' products on that level.
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
To answer your question specifically, NO. The current version of the ReplayTV software requires service connection. If there is no guide information, you CANNOT record anything. For newer boxes, if you paid for the lifetime service, you can use it to manually record, but if you are paying month-to-month, then you are outa luck. As for older models, you need the guide information to record.
Also, and this is critical, service connection is required to set the clock.
I have three ReplayTV boxes ("upgraded" 2001, stock 2020, and new 5040), and if the service gets cut, I am screwed.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Here in Austin TimeWarner is trying out a PVR with 80GB of disk space and just about all the features of Tivo (a little dumber and doesn't have commerical skip). It's the same deal as the cable box--you only pay $9.95 a month to lease the hardware.
There is no way that Tivo can compete with that. Even though it has a better product the cable company just has it beat here from a price and marketing perspective. It's almost sad...
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
Their CD-based players (the Rio Volt series) support WMA...not that I've ever needed that capability, as I've always ripped to MP3, but the capability is there.
(On my last long drive, though, I left the SP90 and home and ran AeroPlayer on a Palm Tungsten T. 256 megs is enough for 4-5 hours, and it supports both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. I brought along a CD with more music to load onto the card (through a notebook and a card reader) for the return trip. The SP90 skips on rough roads, but the Palm doesn't.)
BTW, dBpowerAMP lets you convert from WMA to more open formats. (You could also build the WAVDest DirectShow filter (part of the DirectX SDK) and use it in GraphEdit to convert WMA to WAV, but that's a cumbersome approach that requires Visual C++ to implement because the WAVDest filter is only supplied as source.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
I'm glad I did my homework before I bought ...
... not made by Sonicblue, but made by iRiver ...
... which is the same source code for all of the MP3/CD Players they make ...
... and faster than Sonicblue released firmwares in the past ...
I own a RioVolt
It's actually not that bad in my case, because iRiver also makes the firmware (Sonicblue is real slow even though all they have to do is change the device ID)
So, I still get new features on my RioVolt
The network is actually owned and operated by another company. When you signed up for monthly or lifetime memberships, Sonic Blue got a one shot "commission" on the sale. This network also supports the built in TVGuide that my TV has and some of the scrolling menues on sat or cable TV. As I understand it, the Sonic Blue devices will continue to function properly for an indefinate amount of time.
Even if they don't, as long as their schedule subscription service stays around, it's still a good box for hackers to play with - the 4xxxx and 5xxxx series talk to each other with a kind of XML to send programs back and forth, and they have NICs on board, so as you can imagine, it's not impossible to write software for your computer that emulates the request functions of another ReplayTV and sends the program direct to your hard drive in a nice MPEG format.
I was looking into getting one, and if there's confirmation that the service will continue for at least 3 years, I'll probably buy one with a lifetime subscription (which apparently allows manual recording) based on this... just think - a PVR that you don't have to upgrade the drive for internally, because you can download everything from it (and back to it), and no hacking shell necessary.
Get off my launchpad!
Dear Customers,
ReplayTV values your business. We are committed to seamlessly transitioning the ReplayTV Service to the product lineâ(TM)s new owners. Everyone on the ReplayTV team will be working closely with the new owners to ensure that our customers continue to receive the award-winning ReplayTV Service without interruption.
We are optimistic about our future and appreciate your support through this transition.
Thank you,
The ReplayTV Team
I bought a Rio 500. The firmware immediatly corrupted, rendering the device useless. Sonicblue's tools failed.
I'm happy w/ my Nomad IIC now.