HDGiants Lays Off Sales, Marketing Staff
Joseph Palenchar -- TWICE, 5/29/2009
Incline Village, Nev. -- HDGiants, whose music-download service provides losslessly compressed stereo and multichannel music, filed for Chapter 11 in U.S. Bankruptcy Court and laid off its sales and marketing staff, a former executive confirmed.
“HDGiants was running out of funds to go to the next level,” the executive told TWICE. The company’s private investors were unable to agree on terms for raising additional capital, the executive added. “All sales and marketing are on hold,” the former employee said. Only CEO Scott Bahneman and perhaps one person in technical support were still on the job as of Friday.
The executive did not know if the company would continue to offer its services under Chapter 11, but as of Friday, May 29, the download site was still operating. The service downloads music from the big four music labels and others to PCs and to select residential custom-installed music servers, which are equipped with HDGiants software, the executive noted. Those servers include models from Qsonix and Niveus Media. Downloads are in protected and unprotected form.
The company, which launched its music service in 2005, also offered a movie service in which, through custom installers, consumers bought a home A/V server preloaded with packages of 10 to 100 movies from Paramount and HDNet. To get additional movies at a later date, consumers ordered additional packages through the dealer or directly from HDGiants. Those movies were delivered by installers to the home on a hard drive, which uploaded the content to the home server via USB 2.0 port.
The company, however, was transitioning to a movie-download model, but never launched the service. HDGiants created a software developers kits (SDK) that server makers could use to bring the planned movie-download service to their home A/V servers. The company was developing, but didn’t finish, white-label software that would bring the service to Media Center-based servers.
The bankruptcy petition was filed May 18 in the bankruptcy court in Reno, Nev.
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