Roxio Takes Toast, Spins Off As Separate Company

Roxio, makers of the wildly popular Toast CD burning software for the Macintosh, has announced that they are splitting from Adaptec and are now going to exist as a separate company. The story, originally reported at Yahoo!, states that Roxio is in a position to become a major player in the personal computer market due to the rapid rise in the number of users with CD burners. According to Yahoo:

Roxiois CD-burning software, Easy CD Creator for Windows and Toast for Macintosh computers, is the best-selling software of its kind. It was bundled with about 24 million CD recorders in 2000 alone, accounting for about 70 percent of the entire CD recorder market that year.

Analysts say there are expected to be 100 million CD recorders in use worldwide by the end of this year and 400 million by 2004.

While many have long understood the promise of CD-R and CD-RW as a storage medium, only in the last year have prices moved into the range of "truly affordable" for the average computer user. Also over that time, all of the major computer makers have offered some type of recordable CD device in their systems right out of the box. Combined with advances in the simplicity and reliability of CD mastering software, notably Roxiois products, one might expect the CD-R/CD-RW market to just be starting to take off.

Roxiois business has grown as the blank compact disk market has exploded, and as people have increasingly created their own CDs. Blank compact disk production has soared, with about 4 billion blank CDs shipped in 2000.

The next big thing was initiated with the introduction of Appleis iDVD software. The new software from Apple, optimized to work only on systems containing G4 processors, allows users to easily create DVD disks that can be played in many consumer DVD players. This video market seems to be Roxiois next target.

Nevertheless, analysts said Roxio needs to expand into video applications to sustain its growth.

Gorog said Roxio was poised to expand in the video recording market.

``In the next four to six weeks, weill be making a big announcement on Roxiois entry into DVD recording,ii said Gorog.

It appears that users can expect big things from Roxio over the next few months. You can find the full story at the Yahoo! Web site.