July 16, 2005 – NEW information indicates that the digEplayer handheld IFE system is manufactured in Korea rather than the United States, as suggested in Inflight Online on July 14.

The company currently building the units on behalf of California’s e.Digital, which supplies them to APS/Wencor, is Maycom Co Ltd, located in the city of Anyang in South Korea. Maycom took over digEplayer manufacture from another Korean company, Digitalway of Seongnam, which, it now emerges, carried out the original industrial design of digEplayer.

Both Maycom and Digitalway specialise in making portable MP3 players, which formed e.Digital’s primary business during 2000-2003. Digitalway manufactured MP3 players on behalf of the Californian company, which also dealt with Maycom for the same purpose.

Informed sources indicate that digEplayer inventor Bill Boyer of APS originally approached e.Digital for help in developing the system. e.Digital outsourced the industrial design to Digitalway, which produced prototypes based on Boyer’s drawings and went on to launch initial production. e.Digital also obtained key elements of the system from other suppliers, licensing audiovisual technology from Ittiam of India and the video-encoding and digital rights management (DRM) software from DivX of San Diego.