Zappiti Is Closing Down

All Image Credit: Zappiti

Originally founded in 2009, the French company Zappiti is ending its decade-long run designing and manufacturing high-performance 4K media players and AV servers. During its early years Zappiti developed a management system for movies and TV shows for the Russian brand Dune HD. Then in 2013 it launched its own media players creating a solid reputation for providing customers with convenient access to their entire movie libraries, plus movie trailers and additional content, with their powerful search engine

It would appear that besides copyright issues, there may have also been a demise in hardware-based playback and storage solutions as online streaming has rapidly grown, leaving little demand for their hardware products.

In early October Zappiti sent an e-mail to its retailers and reviewers announcing that “Zappiti will be over soon.” According to the email, the company had been fighting since January 2023 to keep their doors open. It seems that Zappiti has been struggling with a number of legal issues regarding the copyrights of ripped Blu-ray movies, that has now resulted in the  company’s cloud service, which uses metadata to identify movies ripped from discs and organize them on Zappiti’s interface, will be disconnected before the end of 2023.

For current owners this means that Zappiti’s software will no longer work on either their media players or NAS device. Users should be able to create an offline collection and the Zappiti Explorer interface should still work giving users access to their movies via their NAS or the internal HDD, plus NAS owners will still be able to rip and access video files. Zappiti has said that it is looking at creating a new app that can be installed to gain access to their products. No word yet on its arrival, cost or if it will have an annual fee. Zappiti have also indicated that such a solution will; require users to setup a new account and a new collection and that they will not be able to retrieve existing collections as it it would be on a new cloud.

Warranty service and hardware repairs will be handled by Let’s Get Physical Distribution Inc., the company that distributes the Reavon and Magnetar brands. All players under warranty will still continue to receive new parts as needed for free, but the customer will now have to pay both labor and shipping costs. Out-of-warranty players can still be serviced as usual.

As for the future of Media Players well, there is still Zidoo and their sister brand Eversolo. With alternative products to include; Apple TV and Nvidia Shield, running software solutions like Emby, Plex, and others, that will still support the local management and storage of Blu-ray backups.

This post will be updated as more information is made available.