Re: Is Media 100 Dead? Todays news does not give me comfort!

Regarding TPIX's comments,
I truly love Media 100 products, (I own several Media 100 systems and they have paid for themselves) but over the last 5 years I've become more and more disappointed with Media 100's poor product leadership and Macintosh product development. This is the reason that I've chosen other systems (Cinewave & AJA) to supplement my equipment needs.

My negative comments about Media 100 are based upon Media 100 's history and a continued shrinkage in market leadship. Media 100's annual gross sales at one time approached $50 million, they are a fraction of that now. Some may remember in 1996 when Media 100 tried to develop a PC NLE. - (That was originally "Final Cut Pro", it was being developed by Macromedia written by Randy Ubillos of Adobe Premier fame exclusively for sale by Media 100. That project was horribly managed and eventually Macromedia got fed up and sold the program and all rights to Apple in 1998 and we all know what happened after that!)

When the FCP project fell apart, Media 100 then repurposed the Vincent card with "iFinish". Along the way Media 100 got further sidetracked with buying and selling "streaming media" companies and related products. They eventually sold or closed all of those businesses at a cost of millions.

Instead of investing in new Macintosh hardware technology to support upcoming PCI-X hardware, Media 100 decided to pour millions into a product that no one seemed to ask for - the very powerful 844x product. Sadly, by the time the product development cycle was completed, much market momentum was lost. By the end of the 1st qtr of 2003, the company had only sold 190 units, worldwide!

By 2004, Media 100's accumulated deficit was over $200 million dollars.

Just prior to a Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding, Optibase acquired Media 100 in March 2004 for $2.5 million!

To stop the bleeding, the Media 100 HD was born from the 844x engineering efforts. Unfortunately, now the HD NLE landscape is so competitive (10 bit HD-SDI hardware solutions sell for under a $1,000!), Optibase may never acheive suitable acceptance to reach a profitable critical mass. Any what about the new emerging HDV industrial market, will Optibase/Media 100 have a solution for that?

Based on the brief period (9 months) that Optibase has been actually been in control of Media 100, the Opibase press release would indicate another round of major changes are in store or as TPIX suggested maybe Optibase is just cleaning things up a bit in order to make the Media 100 division an attractive aquistion.

Where does that leave us, the Media 100 user base? What about the future software R&D required to support expected changes from Apple and new technologies emerging in the industry?

I remain very concerned...