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DMX, A Mood Media company, is a "Multi-sensory"
branding agency A branding agency is a firm that specializes in creating and launching brands and rebranding. The role of a branding agency is to create, plan, measure, and manage branding strategies for clients, including support in advertising and other forms ...
based in
Austin Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the seat and largest city of Travis County, with portions extending into Hays and Williamson counties. Incorporated on December 27, 1839, it is the 11th-most-populous city i ...
,
Texas Texas (, ; Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2020, it is the second-largest U.S. state by b ...
. DMX also provides music for cable and
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television Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertising, e ...
networks worldwide, including
DSTV Digital Satellite Television, commonly abbreviated to DStv, is a Sub-Saharan African direct broadcast satellite service owned by MultiChoice and based in Randburg, South Africa. Launched on 6 October 1995, the service provides multiple audio, ...
in Africa. It was the first company to offer music by satellite.


History

AEI Music Network Inc. was founded in 1971 as a music service to license and program original artist music. Its primary focus was custom music programs provided on cassette tapes for domestic and foreign customers. In the 1980s, the company began providing services to international airlines as well as residential and
cable television Cable television is a system of delivering television programming to consumers via radio frequency (RF) signals transmitted through coaxial cables, or in more recent systems, light pulses through fibre-optic cables. This contrasts with broadc ...
systems. In 2001, AEI merged with Liberty Digital Inc. of
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in a deal that gave Liberty 56 percent and AEI 44 percent of the merged company known as DMX/AEI Music. AEI had large national customers into international markets, while DMX had dealt with smaller businesses. DMX also served residential cable television subscribers working on
streaming Streaming media is multimedia that is delivered and consumed in a continuous manner from a source, with little or no intermediate storage in network elements. ''Streaming'' refers to the delivery method of content, rather than the content it ...
over the Internet. The company's on-site digital system known as "ProFusion" was launched in 2002 to deliver and play back high-quality digital music to places around the world. In 2005, DMX was purchased by Capstar Partners which then officially changed the name to DMX, Inc. In the same year, the "ProFusion M5", its first digital platform that controls both video and music content, was launched. Most recently, the company began offering scent marketing as another service for customers. Loral Skynet announced on June 21, 2001 that DMX/AEI would switch from its Telstar 4 to Telstar 8 in 2002. In 2007, DMX applied to
merge Merge, merging, or merger may refer to: Concepts * Merge (traffic), the reduction of the number of lanes on a road * Merge (linguistics), a basic syntactic operation in generative syntax in the Minimalist Program * Merger (politics), the com ...
with a
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, competitor,
Muzak Holdings LLC Muzak is an American brand of background music played in retail stores and other public establishments. The name has been in use since 1934, and has been owned by a division or subsidiary of one or another company ever since. In 1981, Westingh ...
, with the resultant combined entity sold to a third-party buyer. Reportedly,
Mood Media Mood Media Corporation is an international in-store provider of music, digital signage, hold music, on-hold messaging, scent, integrated audio/video, and interactive mobile marketing products. It was founded in 2004, and is based in Austin, Te ...
of Canada had been heavily courted since the beginning, but the combination of the
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's second request for information on the merger, and the
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filing by Muzak disrupted that original merger. Instead, on Thursday, March 24, 2011, Mood Media itself announced that it would be buying Muzak in a $345 million deal, and then a year later also announced it acquisition of the original DMX company which had courted them three years earlier on March 19, 2012, in a deal valued at $86.1 million .


SonicTap

From February 9, 2010, to February 10, 2018, DMX (Music) provided over 84 commercial-free audio-only music channels to
DirecTV DirecTV (trademarked as DIRECTV) is an American multichannel video programming distributor based in El Segundo, California. Originally launched on June 17, 1994, its primary service is a digital satellite service serving the United States. ...
customers, branded as "SonicTap". DirecTV dropped sonic tap in favor of
Music Choice Music Choice (abbreviated as MC) is an American television music service that digitally broadcasts audio-based music channels and video-related content to cable television providers in the United States. Music Choice reaches 65 million househol ...
on February 10, 2018.


References

{{reflist __FORCETOC__ Music companies of the United States Industrial music services