TiVo Corporation, formerly known as the Rovi Corporation and Macrovision Solutions Corporation, was an American technology company headquartered in San Jose, California. Now operating as Xperi, the company is primarily involved in licensing its intellectual property within the consumer electronics industry, including digital rights management, electronic program guide software, and metadata. The company holds over 6,000 pending and registered patents. The company also provides analytics and recommendation platforms for the video industry.
Toshiba Corporation is a Japanese multinational electronics company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. Its diversified products and services include power, industrial and social infrastructure systems, elevators and escalators, electronic components, semiconductors, hard disk drives (HDD), printers, batteries, lighting, as well as IT solutions such as quantum cryptography which has been in development at Cambridge Research Laboratory, Toshiba Europe, located in the United Kingdom, now being commercialised. It was one of the biggest manufacturers of personal computers, consumer electronics, home appliances, and medical equipment. As a semiconductor company and the inventor of flash memory, Toshiba had been one of the top 10 in the chip industry until its flash memory unit was spun off as Toshiba Memory, later Kioxia, in the late 2010s.
Best Buy Co., Inc. is an American multinational consumer electronics retailer headquartered in Richfield, Minnesota. Originally founded by Richard M. Schulze and James Wheeler in 1966 as an audio specialty store called Sound of Music, it was rebranded under its current name with an emphasis on consumer electronics in 1983.
The Enhanced Versatile Disc (EVD) is an optical-medium-based digital audio/video format, developed by Beijing E-World, as a rival to the DVD to avoid the high royalty costs associated with the DVD format. Its development was supported by the Chinese government. While it was intended to replace the DVD standard in China by 2008, the format had failed to gain traction and ultimately faded into obsolescence.
Pioneer Corporation, commonly referred to as Pioneer, is a Japanese multinational corporation based in Tokyo, that specializes in digital entertainment products. The company was founded by Nozomu Matsumoto on January 1, 1938 in Tokyo as a radio and speaker repair shop. Its current president is Shiro Yahara.
PLBY Group, Inc. is an American global media and lifestyle company founded by Hugh Hefner as Playboy Enterprises, Inc. to oversee the Playboy magazine and related assets. Its headquarters are in Los Angeles, California.
TCL Technology Group Corp. is a Chinese partially state-owned electronics company headquartered in Huizhou, Guangdong Province. It designs, develops, manufactures, and sells consumer products including television sets, mobile phones, air conditioners, washing machines, refrigerators, and small electrical appliances. In 2010, it was the world's 25th-largest consumer electronics producer. It was the second-largest television manufacturer by market share in 2022 and 2023.
DVD region codes are a digital rights management technique introduced in 1997. It is designed to allow rights holders to control the international distribution of a DVD release, including its content, release date, and price, all according to the appropriate region.
Silicon Image Inc. was an American fabless semiconductor company based in Hillsboro, Oregon, and active from 1995 to 2015. The company designed circuits for mobile phones, consumer electronics and personal computers (PCs). It also manufactured wireless and wired connectivity products used for high-definition content. The company's semiconductor and IP products were deployed by manufacturers in devices such as smartphones, tablets, digital televisions (DTVs), and other consumer electronics, as well as desktop and notebook PCs. Silicon Image, in cooperation with other companies, was influential in the creation of some global industry standards such as DVI, HDMI, MHL, and WirelessHD.
Coby Electronics Corporation is an American manufacturer of consumer electronics products headquartered in Lake Success, New York, with offices and factories around the world. With the joint efforts of Coby Electronics Co. of Hong Kong and Coby Electronics Corp. of the United States, the products reached consumers in Asia, North America, South America and Europe; however, the company mostly sold in Europe and the United States. Coby also served as an OEM manufacturer for brands including Samsung, NEC, RadioShack's Presidian brand and Hyundai. Its products are still available today.
The DVD is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kind of digital data and has been widely used to store video programs, software and other computer files. DVDs offer significantly higher storage capacity than compact discs (CD) while having the same dimensions. A standard single-layer DVD can store up to 4.7 GB of data, a dual-layer DVD up to 8.5 GB. Variants can store up to a maximum of 17.08 GB.
Blu-ray is a digital optical disc data storage format designed to supersede the DVD format. It was invented and developed in 2005 and released worldwide on June 20, 2006, capable of storing several hours of high-definition video. The main application of Blu-ray is as a medium for video material such as feature films and for the physical distribution of video games for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. The name refers to the blue laser used to read the disc, which allows information to be stored at a greater density than is possible with the longer-wavelength red laser used for DVDs.
HD DVD is an obsolete high-density optical disc format for storing data and playback of high-definition video. Supported principally by Toshiba, HD DVD was envisioned to be the successor to the standard DVD format, but lost to Blu-ray, supported by Sony and others.
China Blue High-Definition is a high definition optical disc format announced in September 2007 by the Optical Memory National Engineering Research Center (OMNERC) of Tsinghua University in China.
BBK Electronics was a Chinese multinational electronics conglomerate. It was a leading consumer electronics brand specialized in audio and video equipment, home entertainment products and home appliances. It also acted as an investor in leading companies in various sectors of consumer electronics. The company specialized in developing consumer electronics products such as smartphones, tablet computers, smartwatches, smart TVs, Hi-Fi equipment, Blu-ray players, and digital cameras.
DVD-Video is a consumer video format used to store digital video on DVDs. DVD-Video was the dominant consumer home video format in Asia, North America, Europe, and Australia in the 2000s until it was supplanted by the high-definition Blu-ray Disc, before eventually both were replaced by streaming services such as Netflix and Disney+. Discs using the DVD-Video specification require a DVD drive and an MPEG-2 decoder. Commercial DVD movies are encoded using a combination of MPEG-2 compressed video and audio of varying formats. Typically, the data rate for DVD movies ranges from 3 to 9.5 Mbit/s, and the bit rate is usually adaptive. DVD-Video was first available in Japan on November 1, 1996, followed by a release on March 26, 1997, in the United States—to line up with the 69th Academy Awards that same day.
Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures (TPM), such as access control technologies, can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. DRM technologies govern the use, modification and distribution of copyrighted works and of systems that enforce these policies within devices. DRM technologies include licensing agreements and encryption.
A videocassette recorder (VCR) or video recorder is an electromechanical device that records analog audio and analog video from broadcast television or other AV sources and can play back the recording after rewinding. The use of a VCR to record a television program to play back at a more convenient time is commonly referred to as time shifting. VCRs can also play back prerecorded tapes, which were widely available for purchase and rental starting in the 80s and 90s, most popularly in the VHS videocassette format. Blank tapes were sold to make recordings.
Quickflix was an Australian company that provided online DVD and Blu-ray Disc rental by mail as well as internet streaming of movies and television shows via online pay-per-view or subscription.
OPPO Digital is an overseas division of Chinese multinational company Oppo, sharing the brand name OPPO with the better known consumer electronics company Oppo. Established in 2004 in Menlo Park, California, US, it conducted all of its sales online. OPPO Digital offered audio and video equipment, including Blu-ray Disc players and personal audio products such as headphones.
