by Nathan Schulhof. It could store up to an hour of music, but despite getting an award at CES 1997 only 25 copies were made. That same year AT&T developed the FlashPAC digital audio player which initially used AT&T Perceptual Audio Coder (PAC) for music compression, but in 1997 switched to AAC. At about the same time AT&T also developed an internal Web based music streaming service that had the ability to download music to FlashPAC. AAC and such music downloading services later formed the foundation for the Apple iPod and iTunes. The first production-volume portable digital audio player was The Audible Player (also known as MobilePlayer, or Digital Words To Go) from Audible.com available for sale in January 1998, for US$200. It only supported playback of digital audio in Audible's proprietary, low-bitrate format which was developed for spoken word recordings. Capacity was limited to 4 MB of internal flash memory, or about 2 hours of play, using a custom rechargeable battery pack. The unit had no display and rudimentary controls. The MP3 standard MP3 was introduced as an audio coding standard in 1994. It was based on several audio data compression techniques, including the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT), FFT and psychoacoustic methods. The first portable MP3 player was launched in 1997 by Saehan Information Systems, which sold its "MPMan F10" player in parts of Asia in spring 1998. In mid-1998, the South Korean company licensed the players for North American distribution to Eiger Labs, which rebranded them as the EigerMan F10 and F20. The flash-based players were available in 32 MB or 64 MB (6 or 12 songs) storage capacity and had a LCD screen to tell the user the song currently playing. The first car audio hard drive-based MP3 player was also released in 1997 by MP32Go and was called the MP32Go Player. It consisted of a 3 GB IBM 2.5" hard drive that was housed in a trunk-mounted enclosure connected to the car's radio system. It retailed for $599 and was a commercial failure. MP3 became a popular standard format and as a result most digital audio players after this supported it and hence were often called "MP3 players". Noticeably, major technology companies did not catch on with the new technology, and instead young startups would come to dominate the early era of MP3 players. The Rio PMP300 from Diamond Multimedia was introduced in September 1998,