End of an Era: OPPO Digital Announces Its Retirement
(OPPO Digital)(April 3, 2018) The market has spoken: OPPO Digital plans to stop manufacturing products. The company has spent the last 14 years leading the disc player segment, producing the industry’s best DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K UHD Blu-ray players. Many of the models have been celebrated by home theater enthusiasts and audiophiles alike, largely due to their ability to play nearly any disc format available, including SACDs.
While generally regarded as pricey, OPPO’s players have collected universal praise for parts selection and build quality, in addition to resoundingly superior customer support. In fact, the company’s legendary industry status was largely built upon quick firmware updates and friendly customer interactions.
In recent years, OPPO has branched into Hi-Fi audio realms, releasing several different planar magnetic headphones, audiophile DACs, and its well-reviewed Sonica wireless speaker.
According to OPPO’s blog announcement, the company is planning to “gradually stop manufacturing new products.” And for those new and existing customers, the company will continue to support warranties, offer repair services, and issue firmware updates “from time to time.” OPPO says that its UPD-203 and UDP-205 4K Blu-ray players are the most likely candidates to receive firmware upgrades in the months ahead.
Buyers that have purchased an OPPO product during the last 30 days can still return their purchase for a full refund.
Ultimately, this is an incredibly sad day for fans of disc-based media, highlighting the fact that the CD and Blu-ray market is in serious distress. Warning signs have been abundantly present, however, headlined by Best Buy’s recent decision to cease in-store compact disc sales this summer. And, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, disc sales fell 14% last year while revenue generated by rentals slid 17%. The future is obviously subscription-based streaming, which officially surpassed physical media’s sales dominance during 2016. Add to that the looming rollout of HDMI 2.1 and the potential for 8K media in the coming years, and one has to wonder if any company will have success conjuring healthy sales as new players are needed to meet technology demands.
I’ve reached out to OPPO with a few questions and will update this article as more information becomes available.
Editor's Note:
OPPO kindly replied to our request for additional information. The company contact re-itterated that the news is a "sad announcement for all us involved," and confirmed that the company's choice to cease production is largely due to sales numbers simply not supporting the long term viability of the business. It was added that a rather complex web of factors have contributed to the situation.
The company is actively building its last batch of products and predicts that its store front will remain stocked through June or July. OPPO chose to go public with its decision now so that it has the proper staff on hand to service its customers, which clearly fits with its long history of amazing customer service. It's expected that product support will extend for several years into the future.
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