News

World's First 'Media Center Plasma TV' Stuck in the 'Equity Gap' (5/7/2004)

British Company Takes Up the Technical Challenge of Bringing the PC Into the Living Room, but Finds That Raising Funding is Even Harder

For the last few years the buzzword in consumer electronics has been convergence, where TV, video, DVD and Hi-fi merge with the PC. The first step has been the PVR (Personal Video Recorder) as in the very successful Sky+.

Microsoft Media Center takes things further. This is a variation of Windows XP that runs on a PC and connects to a TV & hi-fi to provide a full convergence system combining everything that a PC can do, such as e-mail, Internet and games, with a DVD recorder, a PVR and a music server storing CDs and MP3s on the hard-disc.

Vivadi, a start-up company based in Swindon UK, have developed a stylish fully integrated 46" Plasma TV that includes a Media Center PC with DVD recorder, PVR & music server, together with a powerful Dolby surround sound system, to produce what they say is the world's first fully integrated, convergence home cinema TV. The product is built using a patented modular construction called Future-proof Electronics Technology that enables it to be easily upgraded and makes the whole thing truly future-proof. It will be in the shops in September.

This a very impressive piece of kit and you'd have thought Vivadi would have had no trouble raising the funds they need to launch it properly, but that's not been the way it's turned out, says MD Paul Roberts, "This really is the Ferrari of televisions, but having a fantastic product is not enough. We've found ourselves in the equity gap - venture capital companies won't invest because we're pre-revenue, whilst the business angel community seems uncomfortable with sums over about GBP200,000. It's so frustrating that we can't give our products the marketing support they deserve, purely because we can't raise sufficient funding."

The government has moved to address this concern, but so far the effect of the initiatives has failed to resolve the problem for the many British start-ups that are struggling to get the funding that their ingenuity deserves.

www.vivadi.com