Rio and ReplayTV developer, SONICBlue, goes bankrupt

April 2, 2003

Maybe you remember, or even
own a Rio MP3 player, or a ReplayTV digital VCR, well the company
behind it SONICBlue is gone. The company already filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
protection, but the company failed to survive. Due some bad elements in the
companies management and several lawsuits the company received a lot of bad
publicity also a possible talks about a take over by the company
D&M (parent of audio equipment makers Denon Ltd. and Marantz Japan)
could not save SONICBlue.

While we
worked very hard with the D&M team over the last few weeks, we were
just not able to finalize all of the needed terms before the court set
deadline," said Greg Ballard, CEO of SONICblue. "Our relationship with
D&M is still strong and we anticipate that they will participate in
the court run auction process in April."

For its part, D&M said, "D&M and
SONICblue were unable to finalize the terms of a transaction before the
deadline expired. D&M remains interested in these businesses and is
evaluating the best way to proceed through the court auction process."

According to the article the products of SONICBlue will be auctioned, so
their future is uncertain. The article also reports that ReplayTVs customer
service would be continued. Read the entire story here.

Source: Internetnews.com