Apex Digital, Inc. is an American

electronics manufacturer The electronics industry is the economic sector that produces electronic devices. It emerged in the 20th century and is today one of the largest global industries. Contemporary society uses a vast array of electronic devices built-in automated or ...

based in

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California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

founded in 1997. It manufactures and distributes high definition and LCD panel televisions, DVD recorders and players, and other digital items including photo frames and bookshelf audio systems. It also has an office in

Ontario, California Ontario is a city in southwestern San Bernardino County in the U.S. state of California, east of downtown Los Angeles and west of downtown San Bernardino, the county seat. Located in the western part of the Inland Empire metropolitan area, i ...

History

Apex Digital, Inc. was founded in 1997 by Wasim (CEO) and Ancle Hsu (Chief Operating Officer). In 2000, it introduced its first DVD players – the AD-600A – to the US market, which became successful due to their ability to play MP3 files; used to download music files off the internet during the height of the

Napster Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing application. It originally launched on June 1, 1999, with an emphasis on digital audio file distribution. Audio songs shared on the service were typically encoded in the MP3 format. It was founded by Sha ...

controversy. By the end of 2001, Apex was the second leading marketer of DVD players in the US after

Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...

. In 2001, Apex became the first company certified to produce DVD players compatible with

Eastman Kodak The Eastman Kodak Company (referred to simply as Kodak ) is an American public company that produces various products related to its historic basis in analogue photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, and is incorpor ...

’s picture CDs and its ViDVD player enabled users to connect to the internet. Apex introduced new products in 2002, including a DVD player with a built-in hard drive for downloading TV programs and a range of television sets. In 2003, the company held 17% of the US DVD player market and began selling 42-inch HD plasma screen TVs and LCD monitors. Stephen Brothers, who originally led sales and marketing efforts, was named president in September of that year. In January 2004 Apex introduced the " ApeXtreme" console for playing PC video games on a television screen. The system was cancelled in December that year; during this period, Ji was arrested in China on fraud charges against a supplier. In 2019, Apex Digital entered a partnership with Bluestar Alliance, a private equity firm, to purchase

Brookstone Brookstone is a chain of retail stores in the United States and China. It was founded as a mail-order business in 1965, when it started selling items, such as dental clamps and other specialty tools. Its first physical location opened in 197 ...

's online and wholesale businesses. Brookstone is a retail chain that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2018.

Controversies

A programming loophole in Apex’s first DVD player model meant that users could circumvent regional lockout and Macrovision’s copyright protection, meaning they could play DVDs from any region globally and record them onto videocassettes. Apex quickly discontinued the model and this problem was resolved in subsequent manufacturing. Apex agreed to pay

Philips Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), commonly shortened to Philips, is a Dutch multinational conglomerate corporation that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, it has been mostly headquartered in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarters is ...

, Sony and Pioneer a $7 patent royalty fee for every DVD player it produced, following a copyright infringement suit in 2002.

Acquisitions and partnerships

From 2002 Apex developed its range of televisions in partnership with Sichuan Changhong Electric Co. Ltd, China’s largest manufacturer of colour televisions.

References

Electronics companies of the United States Companies based in the City of Industry, California Companies established in 1997 Manufacturing companies established in 1997 {{tech-company-stub