Iriver (originally iRiver) is a brand name of the South Korean company Reigncom Limited. Iriver has been engaged in the digital entertainment industry since its founding in 1999.
Among other things, the company manufactures some technologically advanced consumer digital music products, including portable CD players and devices on which the user can listen to music files in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats.
The company iriver Ltd. (former full name: iriver Co., Limited; until 2004 with the spelling iRiver; today IRIVER) was a manufacturer of MP3 players, mobile video players and e-book readers. It was founded in 1999 as a subsidiary of ReignCom Ltd. and based in Seoul. The company employed 233 people before it was sold to SK Telecom and had been listed on the Korean technology exchange KOSDAQ since 2003.
Today, IRIVER is only a brand of Dreamus Company with sales in South Korea.
History of Iriver
ReignCom was founded in 1999 by seven former Samsung executives. Originally, ReignCom marketed semiconductors, but then focused on the development of MP3 players. Production was moved to China and product design was taken over by California-based INNO Design, with only R&D still based in South Korea.
Their first iriver product was the iMP-100 portable CD player with MP3 support released in November 2000. iMP-100, as well as iMP-200 models were marketed in the United States by SonicBlue under the name Rio Volt. Later models were sold by the company’s own SlimX brand as the “world’s thinnest MP3 CD player.”
In 2002, iriver began developing MP3 players with flash memory. A year later, they sold their first models with 512 MB and 1 GB of flash memory and became a public company listed on KOSDAQ. Hard disk players were also offered to compete with iPods. Iriver thus became one of the market leaders in the short term from the sale of MP3 players.
In May 2006, ReignCom announced that they would focus on the handheld console market and that their sales of MP3 players were declining.
Prior to the sale, iriver had satellite offices in the US, Brazil, Hong Kong and Japan. In Europe, iriver was represented by iriver Europe GmbH, based in Eschborn, from 2004 until its closure. The South Korean private equity firm Vogo Fund had held a significant stake in iriver from 2007 to 2014 as the decline of MP3 players caused the company to lose significant sales since 2009.
In 2013, iriver founded its subsidiary Astell&Kern. The name is derived from the Latin synonym Astell (stars) and the German word Kern.
In 2014, iriver was sold to SK Telecom. After that, only branch offices in Guangdong and Irvine existed, and the distribution of the products was taken over by country-specific service providers.
Products
The product lines included portable MP3 and video players with flash or hard disk storage. CD players and an e-book reader with MP3 support were also offered. They were largely well received by the trade press, with the Story HD e-reader offering the highest resolution on the market for a long time. Most of the company’s MP3 players are supported by the Rockbox open-source operating system.
Iriver E-book reader
In September 2009, iriver released the first e-book reader in its product line; the model, called Story, works using e-ink technology and supports .epub and .pdf e-book formats as well as comics in .jpg or .zip format and music files as .mp3 and .wma. iriver entered into several partnerships with international bookstore chains (Kyobo Books in South Korea, Waterstone’s and WHSmith in the United Kingdom); in Germany, a cooperation agreement was signed with Hugendubel. The successor iriver Story HD (2011) offered a resolution of 768 × 1024 dots at 213dpi with its 6″ E-ink display manufactured by LG. However, sales were discontinued due to a lack of success.
Portable Media Player
iriver’s devices stood out above all for their integrated recording function, which allowed audio signals to be recorded in MP3 format from the built-in microphone, the line input or, if available, the integrated radio tuner. The models could play back all MP3 and Windows Media Audio files. Some models even played the Ogg Vorbis format as well as viewed text, image and/or Adobe Flash files. The video players supported the Windows Media Video and MPEG-4 formats. Furthermore, the current devices had DRM support that could be disabled by the user to play certain music files purchased from the Internet.
H10 with 5GB or 6GB hard disk, from 2004
Clix GEN2 was developed and marketed with Microsoft in 2009.
W10 is said to have WiFi and Internet telephony, as well as a navigation system.