History 2002: CacheVision Disappears

Seagate Technology and Thomson Multimedia launched CacheVision with great fanfare in July 2000, a 50-50 joint venture.

But they have been oddly silent about its disappearance – last February! – which explains why we’re only reporting it now.

At the time of its launch, Thomson’s CEO Thierry Breton indicated that “several ten of millions of dollars” would be invested in the new firm for the development of a PVR model with HDD.

Subsequently, the company tried to orient itself towards software, in order to propose additional functionality on the device.

According to a spokesman from Seagate recently questioned on the matter: “The CacheVision business model was not viable because their market segment was slow to develop and CacheVision lacked the traction to move forward.“

Meanwhile, Thomson Multimedia has hardly given up, and is working on a set-top box with integrated HDD for French Pay-TV company Canal+.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 176 on September 2002 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.