[LEMONS]
7.15.2002
Power Commercial-Free TV to the People
Several years ago, I read about a company that specialized in multimedia cards, called Diamond Multimedia, and it's fight with the RIAA to bring a portable MP3 player to market. At the time, MP3 was still relatively new, and hardly anyone was using the technology. There wasn't even an all-in-one application that would let you rip, encode and play mp3s. (History lesson: at one point, you had to rip your audio to wav/aiff files using one app, another to encode them to MP3, and a third to play them back). When Diamond won the case, I bought a player, the PMP 300, within a week of when they began shipping. I admired the company for putting technology and the interests of everyday people over giant corporations and industry associations. Furthermore, the advent of portable mp3 players helped facilitate the mp3 revolution, it cemented the technology.
Over the last few years, Diamond went through a few name changes. First, they changed the name to Rio, and then (I think) S3, before settling on Sonicblue. Despite the name changes, however, it appears that Sonicblue's philosophy remains the same: a commitment to customers over corporations. For as long as DVRs have been on the market, a cheifcriticism I've heard of them has been that they won't let you skip commercials. To the dismay of industry execs,
Sonicblue cut through all that bullshit. Product placement, anyone?
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