Now (brand)

VideoNow

The first, and most popular, line of "Now" products by Tiger Electronics was introduced in 2003, the VideoNow was a franchise of portable video players for children to watch their favorite shows on the go. The systems use discs called PVDs (which stands for Personal Video Disc), which can store about 30 minutes of video,[1] the length of an average TV show with commercials (a typical TV episode is about 20–23 minutes without them), so each PVD contains only one episode, with trailers at the end to use the leftover time on most PVDs, including Nickelodeon PVDs. Video data is stored on the left audio channel with audio on the right channel, thus making it impossible to achieve stereo sound on the system, which only plays in black and white. The video plays at 15fps. Most of the shows were from Nickelodeon, such as SpongeBob SquarePants and The Fairly OddParents,[2] and later they released shows from Cartoon Network, such as Ed, Edd n Eddy and Dexter's Laboratory, Disney only mostly released episodes of America’s Funniest Home Videos and one Hannah Montana music video. A small amount of movies were also released on the system, but due to the limited space on a PVD, said movies would have to be released on at least three discs, depending on the length of said film.

The first VideoNow was released in October 2003 as a black and white media player, and by 2004, the VideoNow Color was introduced as a more colorized version of the system.