[Xiph-Advocacy] iRiver and OGG

[Levander]

Having been back eyeballing getting a new DAP for awhile, I've been 
looking at iRiver devices.  Last time I was looking, iRiver had just 
released the H10 which Bill Gates held up at some speech he gave at CES 
that year.  I don't know how much I'm just repeating stuff that may have 
been beaten to death on this list, but iRiver was an early adopter of 
OGG.  And, the H10 was one of their first devices not to support OGG.  
They went PlaysForSure, I'm thinking at the time Microsoft was telling 
people not to use competing formats on PlaysForSure devices:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/27/accidental_music_monopoly_bid/

 From having watched it here and there, I remember there was a big drop 
in the iRiver stock price.  The iRiver stock price is hard to look up 
because it trades on some Asian market.  At the time I assumed it was 
because iRiver basically abandoned their existing techie audience with 
their dropping of OGG and UMS in favor of PlaysForSure and MTP with 
hopes of a new customer base that apparently never came.  I never looked 
into it, but that was my assumption at the time.

Going back into looking at DAP's, I'm surprised to see iRiver with a 
slimmed down product line (probably in response to their slimmed down 
stock price), and they now do support OGG on their flagship Clix products...

As you can see, a lot of what I've written is based on what I remember 
and not what I've gone through and researched.  I mention it on this 
list as a suggestion that perhaps someone could research iRiver's 
experience with dropping and re-adopting iRiver support.  From the 
outside, it really does look like iRiver has decided OGG is essential to 
their product strategy.  If someone could get an interview with an 
iRiver exec, iRiver would probably enjoy the publicity in the techie 
audience, and it'd probably make a damn good story arguing the benefits 
of adopting OGG.

Here's a half-hearted effort I made into looking into this same stuff on 
an iRiver enthusiast board:

http://www.misticriver.net/showthread.php?t=53984

Here's a thread I participated in trying to raise hell about iRiver 
dropping OGG when the H10 was being released:

http://misticriver.net/showthread.php?t=10585

It's a long thread and you don't have to read either of these two 
threads to get the gist of this email.

-Levander