IVO-V10

The IVO-V10 treated the optical disc as a multimedia container instead of strictly as a music format, using specially authored discs with menus, stills, video, and interactive content so it behaved closer to a portable media terminal than a normal player. Physically it still borrowed some of the logic of Sony's portable disc hardware, but functionally it was already heading somewhere else.

This model belongs to that brief window when compact disc still seemed ready to branch into a much wider family of uses before most of those paths collapsed. The IVO-V10 is a product from a parallel version of the 1990s where optical media kept multiplying instead of narrowing. That is what makes it interesting now.