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Rio Brand Closes Doors
Castar writes "In a press release today, D&M Holdings announced the end of the Rio brand. Rio had a troubled history, but were responsible for the first mass-market MP3 players as well as more recent popular players such as the Rio Karma. This closing follows the sale of Rio's IP to Sigmatel, maker of chipsets for many audio players, including the iPod Shuffle." From the release: "The company's decision to exit the Rio business followed a determination that the mass-market portable digital audio player market was not a strong enough strategic fit with the company's core and profitable premium consumer electronics brands to warrant additional investment in the category. The original goal of strategic advantage with wholly-owned and branded portable client devices was reconsidered in the context of the costs required to effectively scale and compete in this sector, where competition has grown intense. D&M Holdings will now focus all its resources on the core Premium AV business and advanced content server products."
We got pwn3d by the iPod.
Truth is, Apple simply crushed them with superior development, product and marketing. Apple also maintains a strong market share from the popularity of Podcasting (free advertising) and the Apple Music store. Not to mention a generation that embraces the Ipod and its culture, who can blame Rio for jumping ship?
What they did offer was a nice alternative. I owned a Rio mp3 player and functionally it worked just fine, no qualms. In fact, I enjoyed having a unique player, rather than the trendy Ipod. The problem was Rio just didn't offer any compelling "stand-out" features and the pricing was on-par with Apple's Ipod selection (which gave buyers very little reason to migrate to a Rio player).
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
...to ever fail miserably was the Rio Car. An in-dash computer for playing music, running linux on an ARM processor, with a hard drive, and ethernet - too bad it cost something like $600.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Your competitors get to watch what you're doing, learn from your mistakes, then jump in at the right time. I'm not saying that being first in a market is never a good strategy, but it's long past the time for the business development people out there to wake up and recognize that if you have a first to market strategy, you'd better have an excellent plan for capitalizing on the initial advantage.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I bought my riocar empeg because of easy expandability. It's just a StrongArm running Linux, and I still haven't used the 2nd laptop drive bay (I have a single 40GB drive in there now).
rage, rage against the dying of the light
I own an Empeg. It's now several years old, but at the time, was the best tech out there for putting MP3s into a car. In fact it's still nothing to shake a stick at.
But the empeg folks sold their outfit to rio and started working there. That was pretty much the end of the empeg. It was never really marketed by Rio, and the price never came down much. Rio pretty much let it die. It should have been a really popular product.
if they could have just got that "Riocasting" thing off the ground.
VOTE!
That's great. There WAS NO substantial market for this stuff before Apple came along and did it in a consumer-friendly way that made it easy for non-geeks to download and buy music. They practically created the market that you're accusing them of ruining. That makes sense. I guess.
I'd rather use a player where I am not limited to closed formats like aac.
Silly troll. I have 1000+ songs on my iPod and it has no AACs on it. I have all mp3s that I've ripped from my own CDs or bought from (gasp!) non-Apple music stores. Try knowing what you're talking about before posting. It makes these forums a little more useful.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
AAC is open. It's owned by Dolby Labs and anybody can license it. It is as free for licensing as mp3 is. You do realize that mp3 also requires a license?
You're probably thinking of iTunes music store songs which is AAC in a DRM wrapper. Would you hate mp3 and call it closed if Apple managed to put a DRM wrapper around the mp3 format? Do you rail against the umpteen million models of Windows Media players out there?
The iPod also plays mp3's. So, unless you limit digital audio to a player that plays OGG and FLAC you present yourself as not really knowing what you're talking about.
It's name was Rio and it looked good in your hand
Until the iPod made it seem totally bland
The loss of profit was too much for it to stand
Oh Rio, Rio Apple killed the Rio Brand
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Between Rio's flagship MP3 player (Karma) having major reliability issues (eg hard drive, scroll wheel) and absolutely zero marketing (Rio has never run tv commercials or anything of the sort) I'm not surprised this happened. I own a Rio and while I love it, it's easy to see that switching owners three times set it back considerably and strapped it for resources, at a time when Apple's outclassing them in every visible way *and* has a giant marketing budget for the iPod.
:) Seeing as how Denon is retaining the brand rights, they could very well attempt a comeback in the next decade or so when the market's matured considerably.
Farewell Rio. You made some great products, you made some poor ones, but I do love my partially-working Karma
People don't care about Ogg Vorbis or FLAC. They just don't. In fact the only time I see the word "Ogg" even mentioned is on Slashdot. Ogg and FLAC playback, therefore, just aren't killer features in a player. Everybody uses MP3 (and AAC).
iPod won because it was designed extremely simply with little fluff. While other tech devices have pointless buttons, seams, and lines all over them with long names like "SONY DIGITAL XD450c," iPod was always as simple as a CD player and looked nice. The clickwheel makes it fun to use. I don't know, it just seems really obvious to me why the iPod won and competitors failed. When I go to the local store and see the iPods next to all the bizarre-looking WMA competitors that scream "tech device designed by engineers!" instead of just "music player," there really is no comparison.
As a sidenote, it's amusing how my Wal-mart puts the iPods at the bottom on the floor shelf and hangs all the crappy alternatives above it where people can reach. They have a WMA-based music service to sell, after all.
"Sufferin' succotash."
It's more like this:
Diamond Multimedia was on the road to recovery. Despite falling sales of modems, and the video card market crash after 3dfx started making their own boards (which also claimed Jazz, Hercules, Orchid and Canopus's US market, just to name a few), DMM had made smart moves into selling motherboards and, of course, the Rio.
Then Diamond made the boneheaded decision to purchase S3. It was like they had done a complete 180...S3 was in serious trouble, and Diamond was in no position to bail them out.
The Rio's successor was more of the same: just more built-in memory, no new features. As a result, they lost momentuum.
Eventually, Diamond faltered under the wave of crap. S3 was sold off to VIA, and the audio division of Diamond became SonicBlue. Then ReplayTV sucked, and SonicBlue missed the boat on small hard drive mp3 players.
So, you see the lovely lack of foundation SonicBlue has been trying to stand on. I wonder what they're going to dop now that they sell virtually nothing. Maybe sell off the name to some other company.
Indicentally, I've noticed that the Diamond name has been revived recently, not a bad move for a distributer wanting to open a new market in the US.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Average desktop is ~100W (Higher under load, lower at idle). That works out to 2.4KWh/day, it takes about 0.81 lbs of coal to generate a KWh of electricity (1), so a computer requires about 1.94lbs of coal to run for a day.
t or%20Methodology.pdf
m aterials.html
"Two Circus tents" is a complete bullshit metric, and, regardless, 1.94lbs of coal @ 1.55g/cm^3 (2) equals about 568cm^3 of coal.
In a whole year, a computer requires about 20 cubic meters of coal. That's a lot of coal, but it's still orders of magnitude less than "two circus tents".
Oh, and, by the way - optical mice are far from "useless", and at http://www.ncgreenpower.org/elements/pdfs/Calcula
2: http://www.mcelwee.net/html/densities_of_various_
In fact right now I'm listening to some FLAC-encoded music on my Rio Karma through my stereo.
The Karma is a technical masterpiece. Any audiophile or Linux geek who doesn't own or yearn for a Karma is quite crazy.
Reviewers and market analysts unvariably bestow the title of "iPod Killer" on a new DAP based on one or two big features. Maybe it's size, or maybe it's Ogg Vorbis playback that makes a player an iPod killer. In my opinion iPod Killer isn't a feature but an overall package. The iPod is exceptional in no particular area (except perhaps design). It is so successful because it is a solid overall package that performs everything at an acceptable level.
The Rio Karma was the one player that, from a technical standpoint, I believed could be the iPod killer. (Of course, the marketing strength of Apple prevailed, which says a lot about the market). But technically the Karma defeated the iPod on all fronts. Ogg Vorbis and FLAC playback were the big ones, but it's the little things that really make you appreciate it as a player.
Gapless: My Karma is getting long in the tooth, but there's nothing out there, even today, that comes close to the Karma technically. I couldn't ever go back to a player that doesn't have gapless playback (i.e. automatic elimination of the gap between subsequent MP3 files (inherrent to the MP3 format), and playing gapless Vorbis and FLAC files back gaplessly). None of the HDD players do this (if you know of one that does, please let me know! I want one!)
97dB S:N RCA Line Out: The RCA ports on the dock provided an amazing sound on high-end equipment via the true line out. Using a 3.5mm->RCA adapter in the headphone port just isn't the same.
100Mbps Ethernet port: Not having USB2.0 at the time I, and many others bought the Rio Karma, the ethernet port on the dock was a great way for not only uploading files quickly, but uploading them from a distance, e.g. with your Karma sitting in it's dock on the stereo or hooked up to your car stereo in the garage (using a laptop with wifi to bridge the connection).
Java app: The Java app made uploading and managing music on Linux and MacOSX as well as Windows easy. A lot easier to download a Java app from the built-in web server than to pull out the install CD, run the install, reboot for every computer you want to upload files from (assuming it runs Windows).
Embedded Web Server: OK this one isn't really crucial to the player (it's really cool to show off) but it sure is convenient for downloading the Java app to control the unit. The web server had a lot of unrealised potential (e.g. adding a web interface to control the player) but the Rio developers never added that, and now they never will.
The Dock: The little marvel of a dock, included with all Karma's sold, was cool in its own right. Aesthetically it fits in with most stereo equipment better than the iPod and its dock. Not only does it have a 100Mb ethernet port, stereo RCA outputs, USB2.0 and power port, but it glows blue and flashes in time to the music!
So to say the Karma was ahead of its time is not entirely accurate. The Karma's time never arrived.
But they weren't first to market with a portable mp3 player!
There was a product called the Mp3Man put out by a South Korean company named Saehan. I worked for the US distributor of said product. I still have it in a box somewhere.
The average computer uses as much as two circus tents worth of coal to run on any given day.
Umm, any hard data (from an impartial site, please) for this? I'm guessing you pulled this out of your ass.
Reason why I don't believe it is that my building has thousands of computers, usually running all the time. One circus tent, according to De Boers (warning: large PDF), is 44x44x12 meters, or somewhat less than 23,232 cubic meters Your quote means that every day a computer uses about 46,464 cubic meters of coal every day.
To keep things in perspective, the United States produced about 2936986.3 tons of coal per day in 2003. Let's say that coal is about 52 pounds per cubic foot on average. That means we produced an average of 112,961,000 cubic feet of coal, or 3,196,796.29 cubic meters, per day. (2936986 * 2000 / 360 /52 * .0283), tons/year->lbs/year->lbs/day->ft^3/day->m^3/day)
If my math is correct (and I did do this in kind of a hurry, so be kind), your statement would mean that only 68 computers (3196796.29 / 46464) running all year long would exhaust the yearly coal production of the United States.
There's no sig like this sig anywhere near this sig, so this must be the sig.
I don't give a damn how a player looks.
I bought an iPod for the UI, period. It could have looked like a spike-filled frozen turkey turning moldy and I still would have bought it.
I actually feel embarassed I own something that looks "trendy" as you say, but I'll suffer for well-designed UI any day.
Having briefly used a Karma I actually cannot fully understand what part of uisng that device you consider superiour to the iPod. I do of course only use my device to play music and perhaps there's some additional feature you make use of I would have no use for.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley