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SonicBlue (Replay/Rio) Bought By D&M
An anonymous reader writes "Here's the announcement that many have been waiting for all week. Yesterday, the ReplayTV and Rio product lines of now-defunct SonicBlue were auctioned off in a bankruptcy court. Despite earlier negotiations failing to result in a deal, the Japanese holding company D&M, makers of high-end Denon and Marantz stereo gear, bought the product lines for $36.2 million. The big question is what about all of the "lifetime subscriptions" that people bought? No answers as of yet, but we can all be hopeful."
Lifetime support has always meant the lifetime of the company. They got what they paid for; it was a gamble, and, unfortunately, they lost.
Silicon Valley Biz Ink is indicating that all current customers will be retained. Hopefully, it works out that way.
-- I
I've been a replaytv user for 3+ years and considering how much effort it takes to support the subscriptions, I'm assuming they will honor the lifetime subscriptions to keep customers loyal.
I mean, how much effort could it take to download a bunch of schedules from tvguide or whoever, encrypt them into the proprietary replaytv format, and put them on an FTP site. For the broadband users, they're done. For dialup, they need a simple agreement with a national ISP to support a few thousand 5 minute calls every night.
Why do I h8 apple?
"D&M Holdings intends to keep all ReplayTV
customers and will design, manufacture and distribute a line of ReplayTV and
Rio products."
Sounds like they plan on continuing as normal. Hopefully D&M won't be buryied like Sonic Blue.
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
They can't be very high end if I've never heard of them. Kenwood, Sony, Pioneer... those are high end. D&M sounds like the Apex of the audio world. Dude, you are probably not an audiophile. Denon and Marantz are related to the likes of Kenwood, Sony and Pioneer like a ferrari to a volkswagen. You probably also never heard of Quad or Nakamichi? heh ... now that's an audio system.
Veni, Vidi, Velcro!
The ReplayTV OS is a modified version of VxWorks from WinRiver.
One shouldn't immediately assume that there are only 2 operating systems in the world. There are a slew more than that, especially in the embedded device arena.