Ziova comes in loud and clear
Ziova general manager Greg Birch says an Australian release for its Clearstream high-definition media players was always on the cards.
Some Australian manufacturers, including fellow Adelaide-based speaker manufacturer VAF Research, have bypassed the local market to focus on the larger overseas scene. Greg says a market is a market – wherever it is.
Formerly called Zensonic, Ziova changed its name to allow global copyright and identity protection around the world, as its products were already on sale in the US and Europe.
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Ziova began in 2004 as a consumer electronics business unit of distributor PC Range. It imported home theatre speakers, remotes, cables and amps for home theatre. Greg claims to have achieved a couple of Australian ‘firsts’ as a distributor, including importing the first DivX player.
The company began importing original equipment, customising it by ordering feature and specification changes. However, there were software issues.
“The product was good but we wanted to add more features,” Greg says.
So the decision was made to move into manufacturing, and by the end of 2005 the business had products including the Zensonic 2500, a HD media player.
“It was the first in the world with HDMI.”
The change of name to Ziova came at the end of 2006, as the Zensonic name could not be trademarked globally. Ziova has established a distribution company in the US and also distributes in Europe.
Ziova is a global operation, with manufacturing in China and software engineering carried out by a team in India. But Greg says product research and design is conducted in Australia by a small team, and the company is discussing using an Australian team for future products to combat the problem of time difference encountered by this global business.
Ziova’s first products for the Australian market are two versions of its Clearstream HDMI network media player, which went on the European market for Christmas 2006 and appeared in the US mid-year.
Clearstream plays a range of digital video, picture and sound formats in high definition. The unit can stream videos directly from a PC via a wireless or wired network, you can plug in a USB hard drive, play from a built-in DVD player and connect digitally to HDTV using HDMI.
It also supports a wide range of file formats including the high-definition FLAC lossless compressed format, OGG, AAC, MP3, Windows Media Audio 9, CD Audio and others, and video formats including Windows Media Video 9, XviD, Nero Digital™, MPEG-4, QuickTime MPEG-4, MPEG-2, MPEG-1 and DVD.
Clearstream also supports streaming Internet radio and connects to the Internet for local weather display.
The CS505 with built-in DVD player has a recommended retail price of $599, and the CS510 without DVD player is $499.
Clearstream HDMI network media players will be distributed by Lake Pacific, after Zensonic decided against distributing direct.
“We wanted to focus on being a manufacturer,” Greg says. “It took some time before we got a distribution partner we trusted.”
The market for networked media players has matured since the first music streaming devices – such as the Netgear MP101 wireless music streamer, which hit the market in 2004.
“It’s still early – I think it’s just past the early adopter phase. People do have to be IT savvy, because it’s networked, but broadband is cheaper and it’s a lot more common for people to have more than one PC in their homes. So people are a lot more educated than they were.”
Ziova has new products on the drawing board. Greg doesn’t want to give away too much detail, but an imminent product will be based on next-generation chipsets, with a view to supporting either HD-DVD or Blu-ray. He believes it’s too early to say which format will be the winner.
The way we watch TV and enjoy digital media is changing, Greg says, and products like Apple TV will help to boost the market.
“We can’t compete with the marketing power of a company like Apple, but those sorts of things educate people into this kind of market.
“I like the fact that more products are coming out, and they’re more stable and user-friendly. The worst thing that can happen here is for a bad product to come out and fail.”
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