BNMvideo

Anyone familiar with this “brand”?

I have owned most known CC decoders but this one…?
There is also a VB1400 but no idea what the difference is?
Shifting caps up or down?

A French CC decodeur??

We didn't have CC in France... what would be that for?

Julien

Aprés la deluge! Le potage sportif! Le boulangerie c'est trés chere avec les ananas!!!!!!!!!!!

Is this them? It seems BNM Video have been around a while. Mostly in video and electrics wholesale...according to my schoolboy French.

https://www.societe.com/societe/bnm-vid ... 66356.html

BNM VIDEO, société à responsabilité limitée, immatriculée sous le SIREN 392866356, est en activité depuis 28 ans. Installée à PARIS (75016), elle est spécialisée dans le secteur d'activité du commerce de gros d'appareils électroménagers et de radio télévision. Societe.com recense 3 établissements ainsi qu' un mandataire depuis le début de son activité, le dernier événement notable de cette entreprise date du 04-05-1999. Bruno NAPOLI est gérant de l'entreprise BNM VIDEO.

French company that manufactured these I'm guessing...

It deserves an entry I suppose!

=> BNMvideo VB 1300

Now... looking for the VB 1000, 1100, 1200, 1400...

Julien

This page mentions they brand/company has stopped operating and that their latest storage/multi-room audio/video systems can be upgraded (for a fee) to a 4K Zappiti server.

Maybe 2 French companies on the same segment, was one too many? One folded, the other one survived.
They received some awards for their video storage/replay solutions around 2011/12, announced a low cost version in 2014... and then disappeared.

Last snapshot of the website is from 2018 with a (c) 2014.

Not a single BNMvideo entry on eBay.fr or LeBonCoin.fr.

They just dropped from the face of the Earth... or just merged with Zappiti?

...

Got it! Co-Founder's LinkedIn here gives the timeline: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bruno-napoli-aa0a6475/details/experience/

Electric furnitures (Legrand) => Home Theater installations (Cine Laser, Espace Plus, Cine Now, Home Cinema Services) => Community Mgr for LAL (Les Annees Laser magazine).

In parallel, started BNM Video to import/rebrand Taiwan (Cypress) devices.
Design, manufacture, marketing and go to market of Closed Caption video decoder for Laserdisc players. Our Closed caption decoders are rapidly distributed in all major AV shop like Fnac and Virgin as well as a good part of the Hi-fi and Home Cinema shop in Europe.

Company was closed in 2018 when he moved to Hong Kong.

Now... I'm wondering if he could be the co-founder of a HK company that a schoolmate has been running in HK for years ...
Might have even met him for a beer in Singapore few years ago!

I'll contact him to get some info on the old CC models.

Julien

I reached to him and he got back to me!

Turns out we overlapped a few times in the past 25 years (LD, Closed Caption, Amiga, DVD region-free hacks) even though we never crossed.

I ended up getting the full BNMvideo story (quite a ride!) and added the missing devices here.




They were indeed CC decoders for the French/European market for early adopters who were importing NTSC LD/VHS in the 80s and 90s.
At that time the TV broadcast and home video market in France had a 2 to 3 years delay.
The LDs were usually released in the USA within a year of the theater release.

Basically you could import (not for cheap!) LDs of films sometimes not even released yet in France -- I remember watching Scream 2 US LD a whole week before it was released theatrically in France. CC decoder was helping understanding the dialogs.

He offered to kindly write a little story (in English) of BNMvideo. We'll post it here when it's ready!

Julien

Bonnet de douche!

another one turned up online