The company D&M holdings, who currently owns the Rio brand, has decided to pull Rio out of the market. The Rio 500, which was one of the first MP3 players on the market has been very successful during its time and there were even 3rd party tools developed for it such as to change the writing fonts, welcome screen to even adding Linux support. The RIAA even tried suing Rio, claiming their MP3 players were only there to support consumers who illegally download music.
Unfortunately, the later RIO players were not so successful, which resulted in competitors such as the iPod quickly taking over. As a result, the Rio became a loss maker, so D&M holdings has decided to discontinue its Rio products and move to profitable products such as high-end home theatre products and professional audio equipment.
According to an analyst, it is difficult to do well now in the MP3 player market unless you are Apple, due to their iPod share currently at 75% of the market. In the quarter ending June 30th, D&M lost 1.04 billion yen, mostly contributed by Rio. Diamond Multimedia originally released the very first Rio players, including the popular Rio 500. Sonicblue then bought Diamond multimedia in 1999. Finally, D&M took over the Rio business when Sonicblue filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Thanks to Gil T Pleasure for using our news submit to let us know about the following news:
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D&M Holdings Inc. will concentrate on profitable, high-end home theater and professional audio products that sell under the Marantz and Denon brands. The loss-making Rio players, which sell for as little as $80, have become "mass market" and don't fit with the company's strategy, said Hector Marinez, a D&M spokesman. Since the Rio was introduced in 1998, the market for digital music has ballooned to a $6.9 billion business and Apple's iPod snatched 75 percent of the U.S. market. D&M, based in Kanagawa, near Tokyo, said in May that it was looking at options to reduce the effect of Rio's losses, which reached 960 million yen (or $8.75 million) last quarter. "It's hard to make money in this market if you are not Apple," Steve Baker, an analyst at Port Washington, N.Y.-based market researcher NPD Group Inc., said in an interview. "Now there is little barrier to anyone wanting to enter the market," he said. |
It is a pity to see the original brand of MP3 players leaving the market. In my opinion, if the Rio 500 was not discontinued, they would probably have done much better, especially since many of their later players were more restrictive and did not support the 3rd party tools developed for the Rio 500. At the time, the Rio 500 was more sophisticated than many other players on the market: It featured a backlit dot matrix display, scroller-wheel, graphic equaliser, smartmedia expansion slot, 64MB of internal memory and ran off a single AA battery.
Gil T Pleasure wrote: Rio, the first portable MP3 player that hit the market, is stopping production permanently. 🙁
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
