i don't think it is just a coincidence that crus popped up a point today within 1/2 hour of this press release. gee, i wonder who is supplying the chip for toshiba. get used to this -- we will be riding the online music train all the way thru xmas.
Toshiba plans MP3 player
By Bloomberg News
Special to CNET News.com
July 28, 1999, 11:20 a.m. PT
Toshiba this year will start selling a portable device to play music downloaded from the Internet, marking the electronics company's return to the audio market amid expectations that online music distribution is set to boom.
The player will reproduce MP3-format digital music downloaded by personal computer and saved onto memory cards or some other form of removable storage media, said a Toshiba spokesperson who asked not to be identified. It will go on sale simultaneously in Japan and the United States.
Toshiba, which phased out its line of audio equipment in 1989 in the face of fierce competition from more specialized competitors, is betting the development of online music distribution offers a way back into that market. The company is forecasting that global sales of Internet-compatible players will soar to 10 million units by 2003 from 1 million this year.
"Toshiba needs to be moving into Internet-related businesses, and as one means of getting there I think this is a positive step," said Mami Indo, an analyst at Daiwa Institute of Research. "Depending on how attractive the price and format of this new generation of players are to consumers, the global market may indeed grow as fast as Toshiba is predicting."
Today's news comes just a month after the world's biggest record companies and their counterparts in the technology industry released a preliminary set of security guidelines for Internet music players. The guidelines call for record companies to add a digital "watermark'' to music released on CDs or online, facilitating detection of copied data.
There are at least 500,000 songs already available for download on the Internet in the MP3 format. The technology has been criticized by the music industry for making it easy to copy and distribute over the Internet compact-disc-quality music without regard for copyrights or royalties.
The price of Toshiba's player hasn't yet been decided, the spokesperson said. Toshiba is the second largest of Japan's three general electronics manufacturers, whose product range stretches from televisions to washing machines to elevators. Consumer electronics accounts for about a fifth of its sales.
The company finished in the red last year for the first time in 23 years as global prices for computer chips slumped. It's forecasting a profit of 25 billion yen through March 2000.
The competition
San Jose, California-based Diamond Multimedia Systems began shipping the first commercially available MP3 portable player, the Rio, last November. Several other companies have announced plans to develop competing products.
In Japan, Sony plans to release sometime this year a version of its world-famous Walkman that features a "memory stick" that plays Internet music saved in a format called ATRAC3, said spokesman Shigenori Yoshida.
Matsushita Electric Industrial wants to get an Internet music player in stores in time for the year-end shopping seasons, said a spokesman who asked not to be identified. The player won't use the MP3 format.
Music sold by direct downloading off the Internet will achieve $147 million in sales by 2003, according to a forecast issued last week by Jupiter Communications.
Copyright 1999, Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved.
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