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About this video
What happened to Diamond Multimedia, the company behind the Monster 3D graphics card and the Rio MP3 player that beat the record industry in court, only to end in bankruptcy? In the 1990s Diamond was one of the biggest graphics card makers in the world, and its Monster 3D carried 3dfx’s Voodoo chip into gaming PCs everywhere. In 1998 it launched the Diamond Rio, the first commercially successful portable MP3 player, and when the RIAA sued to stop it, Diamond won a landmark Ninth Circuit ruling that shaped every music player that followed. Within months, though, the company was sold to S3, which shut down the graphics card business, renamed itself SONICblue and bet everything on the Rio and the ReplayTV digital video recorder. Then a $561 million loss on its stake in a Taiwanese chip foundry wiped out its cushion, and 28 Hollywood studios and networks sued over ReplayTV’s commercial skipping. Using SEC filings and court records, this documentary explains how SONICblue ended up selling its brands at a bankruptcy auction for $36.2 million, and why the lawsuits were not really what killed it.
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