iRiver: Оңтүстік Кореялық Музыкалық Технологиялар Тарихы

South Korean consumer electronics company
a brand and marketing division

iRiver, stylized IRIVER and formerly as iriver, is a South Korean consumer electronics division owned by Dreamus which markets music and other accessories in its domestic market. The company, then officially known as ReignCom, was created in 1999 by seven former Samsung executives, initially releasing portable CD players and later widely known in the 2000s for a line of digital audio players and other portable media devices. In 2019, the company was rebranded as Dreamus.

In 1999, Duk Jun Yang and Rae Hwan Lee left Samsung Electronics, along with five colleagues. They formed ReignCom, with Yang as CEO, originally as a semiconductor distributor, then decided to capitalize on the growing MP3 player market. They decided to outsource manufacturing to AV Chaseway, in Shenzhen, China, and contract product design to INNO Design, an industrial design company in Palo Alto, California, while keeping R&D in house. By now, iRiver portable CD players had achieved high domestic popularity and were also popular elsewhere. iRiver was one of a number of South Korean companies who were dominating the worldwide MP3 industry in these early years.

In 2002, iRiver scrambled to develop its first flash memory player to meet demand from the U. S. Best Buy chain. This led to the release of their first DAP product, the iFP 100 "Prism" named as such because of its distinctive shape designed by its design firm partner, INNO Design. By the end of the year, iRiver had already gained as much as 20% of the domestic market and was steadily increasing popularity in foreign markets. with its iFP 500 "Masterpiece" player. It had also completed its IPO at KOSDAQ, a Korean stock exchange. The company was also selling hard drive players to compete with the iPod: the iHP 300 followed by the H300. iRiver rose to the No. 1 position in the global market of flash players. Its global market share overall was 14.1% in 2003, while Apple led with 21.6%. The marketing of iRiver America was mostly spent on PR and brand partnerships, featuring celebrities such as Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg. By 2004 iRiver had gained solid market share in the digital audio player market in both the United States and Japan, and sold a total of 2.8 million players worldwide, of which 1.7 million was in the overseas market. During this time, the company went through a rebranding, including changing the styling of its name from iRiver to iriver, and using a ruby red themed logo in place of blue. It also used adult film star Jenna Jameson and an Audrey Hepburn lookalike as spokesmodels promoting its products. In 2005 the company decided to focus entirely on flash players like the H10, and the development of jukeboxes (except from the 20 GB version of the H10) was stopped as a result. The company also announced plans for digital audio players featuring Internet telephony. iRiver's U. S. unit, based in Vancouver, Washington, held 3.4% of the U. S. MP3 player market in 2005, according to IDC down from a peak of 13%. The company targeted early adopters among American users as it tried to regain dominance of the category. It also opened sales divisions in Brazil, Germany, Hong Kong and Japan. iRiver's parent Reigncom made significant financial losses by the end of 2005. and other electronics, publicly reporting its intentions of quitting the PMP market. including a loss of 35.58 billion won (US$36.68 million) in 2005, compared with a net profit of 43.46 billion won in 2004. In its South Korean home market, iRiver once accounted for 50% of sales and the company has bought ads claiming its products are a symbol of patriotism. It has also operated a small chain of iRiver Zone stores, with locations in Korea, Japan, and China. The Incheon International Airport shop features a large heart shaped art piece, which represents the corporate "Heartbeat Philosophy" of "dedication to its customers". Its European market share had dropped to 0.4% in 2006, down from 1.3% the year prior, and it had also fallen in Japan and the US. Deep losses followed in 2009 and 2010. The company also bought the Siren brand in Japan from A MAX Japan, despite protests from Siren Inc. itself. In 2009 its parent company renamed itself to iRiver and the brand expanded to other products including the Dicple series of electronic dictionaries in South Korea and then the iRiver Story e book reader.

The iRiver Story reader was released in 2010 and was followed by the Cover Story. The Story HD successor was launched in 2011 which was also iriver's first e book reader in the American market. That same year, iriver launched its first Android smartphone and tablet in the domestic market. iRiver was sold to SK Telecom in 2014. In 2013, iRiver launched the premium brand of Astell & Kern. As the digital music player market had changed, Astell & Kern consisted of premium products instead of iriver's older conventional players. In 2019, the iRiver company changed its name to Dreamus.

iriver's products can all play MP3 and WMA audio files. Some units support text viewing, Ogg Vorbis audio files, Macromedia Flash, and/or BMP files. The company also supported Microsoft PlaysForSure, which allowed some products to support subscription based music download services, including URGE, Napster, Rhapsody, and Yahoo! Music Unlimited. It also let users disable its DRM functionality. Many players support multilingual display. They support Winamp playlists and allow repeat, shuffle play and programmable functions. Several preset and one user defined EQ settings are included, plus a built in FM tuner. A nearly unique feature of some iriver players was the direct MP3 recording capability with selectable bitrate of internal (FM, microphone) and external (line) sources. Most iRiver players include a unique feature called study mode. Users can quickly jump back and forth within tracks by a certain time interval, set from three to 180 seconds in current models. The option was designed to help people listening to recorded language lessons. SonicBlue removed this feature from its rebranded Rio Volt models, causing some users to hack their players with iRiver firmware from other regions. Initially connecting devices to the computer for music transfer required the iRiver Music Manager. In later firmwares UMS is supported so that the computer's native file explorer could be used to transfer files. Iriver eventually dropped UMS support for the U10, T30, T20 and T10 models in favor of Microsoft's MTP. The company later released an official Firmware Updater that allows users to switch between the MTP and UMS interfaces.

In 2002 iRiver introduced the iDP 100 using the short lived optical format DataPlay that holds 500MB data.