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Technology Stocks : S3 (A LONGER TERM PERSPECTIVE) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Calvin Scott who wrote (13454)	8/2/1999 4:04:00 PM
From: SBHX	Respond to of 14577

How about taking a portable CD player, add a cheap CPU and memory, put MP3 on cdroms, and try to sell that as a format. 1. Relatively few people have CD burners. 2. With a CD like that, you could listen for up to 24 hours non stop, but I doubt if any company can find enough legal good material to fill such a CD, and still sell it for a low price. One CD could contain all the songs anyne would want to listen to all year, so the [LEGAL] unit sales for these CDs would be very low. The piracy market is probably incredible in units, but those CDs are selling for < $5 in dark alleys in the far east. 3. Few will be willing to build such a piece of h/w that supports a [LEGAL] market as small as this,and only far east operators can justify selling such a machine. China alone could probably absorb 5M units a yr, but that would be supporting piracy. :-) 4. BUT : the technical barriers are non-existent, the development effort is probably 2 wks :-) including pcb layout for the person who has done MBs before. In the legal realm of MP3, it seems like a CF cartridge of 96MB or so is the most anyone would need. Assuming that the RIO and the MP3 machines do take off, the ones that use CF will do help companies making Compact Flash (CF) along. The curious thing is that the margin on a 96MB CF is probably significantly higher than that of a Rio. Disclaimer : I have a position in SNDK.

To: Calvin Scott who wrote (13454)	8/2/1999 4:55:00 PM
From: Herc	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14577

I disagree. The usual CD holds about one hour of music. You can't jog with a CD player. An MP3 player is much more compact. In order to record CD's, you have to get a CD burner. The CD burner can't also be used to listen to the music, much less be carried around with you. The MP3 players now come with an extra 32 megs of removable flash memory for another 30+ minutes of music. 100MB chips are becoming available. And if you have ADSL or a cable modem then the downloads should be quick. Plus the new Rio 500 uses the USB port for downloads which is quicker than the the parallel port. Flash memory may well be the next revolution in recorded music making the CD obsolete. Imagine sticking a tiny chip into you dashboard radio for MP3 playbacks. No need for an extra CD player I'm broke & depressed. I need a pickup. So this work daddy is ordering the new Rio 500. That way I can make more informed postings to SI. All of this is so new that no one really seems to be an expert. But if S3 drops below 10, I'm out of here.