SonicBlue Drivers Update

SonicBlue Drivers

Company: SonicBlue

Description: The SONICblue Company was developed from the merger of two different companies: S3 Graphics and Diamond Multimedia.

S3 Graphics was a graphic chipset company. Graphic accelerators made by the company are used in a number of home computers. Its products are marketed under the brand name S3 Chrome. This graphics chipset is one of the direct competitors of Nvidia’s GeForce and ATI’s Radeon cards.

Diamond Multimedia specialized in multimedia technology. The company also made a number of other computer parts and computing devices. It made graphics cads, motherboards, modems, sound cards and MP3 players.

Diamond was known for its development of one of the earliest MP3 players in the market called Diamond Rio. Even though it was not the first of its kind, it was one of the first that was widely accepted by consumers. The Diamond Rio was also one of the first MP3 players that were sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The RIAA wanted Diamond to stop making the devices because they promoted the unauthorized use of copyrighted music. Diamond however won the deal on June 16, 1999. This allowed the company to continue manufacturing the Rio MP3 players in spite of the charges.

Immediately after Diamond won the RIAA lawsuit, S3 purchased the company. The merged company was renamed SONICblue in 2000. The company’s ticker symbol in the stock market was changed to SBLU.

SONICblue’s first Chief Executive was Ken Potashner. Most of the original divisions of S3 were sold so that the new company could focus on multimedia devices. The graphics chip business that was the center of the S3 Company was sold to VIA Technologies. SONICblue also ended its distribution agreements with Dell Computer. The new company remained focused on the Rio player, designing and distributing versions that were branded with the Nike-logo.

SONICblue changed fully in 2001 when it acquired a company called ReplayTV. The company was a bankrupt manufacturer of hard-drive based video recorders. The equipment they made was similar to the latter-released TiVo.

The company again encountered legal trouble after it modified ReplayTV devices. SONICblue added the feature that allowed users to skip advertisements. Several media companies responded with a law suit. This new suit claimed that the features of the new ReplayTV interfered with the revenue they made from placed advertisements.

SONICblue filed for a chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on March 21, 2003. Most of the company’s assets were sold to other companies. Rio MP3 players and ReplayTV devices are now owned by D&M Holdings. The GoVideo brand was sold to Opta Systems. The lawsuit with the media companies was stalled after SONICblue filed for bankruptcy.