The living room “is another area of opportunity” for YouTube growth, said Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai on a Q1 earnings call Tuesday. “On average, viewers are watching over 700 million hours of YouTube content on televisions every day,” he said. Within the next year, “we will give YouTube's connected TV viewers new smartphone control navigation and interactivity features, allowing people to comment and share content they are watching on television directly from their devices,” he said. Brands are turning to YouTube “to tap into the shift to streaming and reach new audiences in smarter and more efficient ways,” said Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler. “We've recently rolled out new tools to help advertisers consistently plan and measure” their connected TV spend across platforms, he said. “Later this year, in partnership with Nielsen, we'll help brands directly compare their YouTube reach to linear TV, including the ability to measure co-viewing. This apples-to-apples comparison will be a game changer in helping advertisers make smarter investment decisions.”
Corning gleaned from proprietary Q1 retail data that TV unit sales during the quarter were “a little bit lower" globally than what its models predicted, “but we still anticipate growth for the year” by a high-single-digit percentage over 2021, said CEO Wendell Weeks on an earnings call Tuesday. Revenue in Corning’s Q1 display-glass business jumped 11% year over year to $959 million, and net profit in the segment reached $236 million, also up 11% from the 2021 quarter.
UPS is unfazed about Amazon’s Buy With Prime initiative and any possibility it could erode the revenue UPS draws from small and medium businesses, said CEO Carol Tome on a Q1 earnings call Tuesday. Buy With Prime, announced last week (2204210036), enables Prime members to buy directly from third-party merchants’ online stores with free shipping and other Prime perks. UPS has “a very good relationship with Amazon,” said Tome. “As it relates to their latest announcement, we see that as a very clever marketing play by Amazon, but just putting an Amazon Prime badge on a SMB website, if the website even exists, doesn’t put that much risk to us, we believe.”
Consumer intentions to buy new TV sets jumped slightly in April compared with March, according to preliminary Conference Board data released Tuesday. Analytics firm Toluna canvassed 5,000 U.S. homes for the board through April 19, finding 11.3% plan to buy new TV sets in the next six months, up from 11% in March and 11% in February but down slightly from 11.6% in April 2021. Consumer confidence dipped slightly in April after rising in March, said the board: “Concerns about inflation retreated from an all-time high in March but remained elevated. ... Inflation and the war in Ukraine will continue to pose downside risks to confidence and may further curb consumer spending this year.”
Aaron’s already has begun work on implementing an "in-house lease-to-own” program for BrandsMart customers for a Q2 launch, having completed its BrandsMart buy from the Perlman family for $230 million in cash April 1 (see 2204010026), said CEO Douglas Lindsay on a Q1 earnings call Tuesday. “We’re also preparing to add some of the BrandsMart product catalog” to the online Aaron’s store by the end of 2022, “and are beginning to assess procurement synergies between the two businesses,” he said. “We have begun assessing optimal locations for new BrandsMart stores, with the intent of opening 1-2 stores per year beginning in 2023.” Results for BrandsMart, which the Perlman family ran as a private company, will be reported with Aaron’s second-quarter financials, said Lindsay. BrandsMart draws half its revenue from sales of major appliances and 25% from consumer electronics, the rest from computers, furniture and other products, said Aaron's President Steve Olsen, to whom the BrandsMart team will report.
Pearl TV Managing Director Anne Schelle expects the NextGenTV logo for ATSC 3.0-compliant TVs to become “widely adopted,” she said on a prerecorded NAB Show video preview that debuted Monday on ATSC’s YouTube channel. “Once we get past 80% household penetration” on 3.0-compliant sets, “you’ll see some of the big-box retailers really jumping in” to promote and support the logo, Schelle told ATSC President Madeleine Noland in an interview on the video. “More and more consumers, with our advertising, are going in the store and they’re asking for NextGen. The more that happens, the more you’ll see the logo out there.” Schelle sees the industry “doubling down” on 3.0 marketing in 2022 and into 2023” she said. “It’s incredibly important that we get that message out there, to let consumers know. We need that consumer pull. That consumer pull drives retailers, talks to the TV manufacturers.” The industry needs to “get to scale as fast as we possibly can, because that then brings in the opportunities” for broadcasters' return on investment, said Schelle. “From there, I think you’ll see a lot of the activity around datacasting, which is a longer-term play, but it’s definitely a viable play,” she said. “We need to have a really successful television play in order to get to that datacasting play.”
Kidoodle TV, the ad-supported children's VOD service based in Calgary, owes Vizio more than $3 million in unpaid advertising fees, plus interest, alleged Vizio in a breach-of-contract complaint Friday in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, California. In March 2020, the companies signed an internet applications platform agreement, which included revenue-sharing terms, to offer the free Kidoodle TV service on Vizio’s SmartCast platform, Vizio said. None of the nearly two dozen invoices that Vizio sent Kidoodle TV for ad placements since August 2020 has been paid, despite the “numerous attempts” Vizio made in writing as recently as March “to collect the amounts due,” the complaint said. Kidoodle TV didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Three community colleges in Maricopa County, Arizona, are working with industry to soon launch a “quick start” program aimed at seeding “first-generation college-goers” for careers in semiconductor fabs, Leah Palmer, executive director of the Arizona Advanced Manufacturing Institute at Mesa Community College in Tempe, told a Semiconductor Industry Association webinar Thursday on the challenges and opportunities of attracting skilled talent to the U.S. semiconductor workforce. Intel, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and 15 other chipmakers and their suppliers are involved.
Harmonic added HDR10+ support to its VOS360 cloud streaming platform and is doing the “first trial” of that enhancement with Evoca, an ATSC 3.0-based pay-TV service, said Harmonic Thursday. The Samsung-developed HDR10+ technology, supported by more than 130 companies, “adds dynamic metadata to HDR10 source files to optimize the color contrast and image details of each frame of the HDR video to the consumer's display capabilities,” said Harmonic. Evoca “could become the world's first ATSC 3.0 service that offers an ultra-high-definition channel encoded by HDR10+ for exceptional high dynamic range," said Michael Chase, Evova vice president-systems. Evoca "has been broadcasting a 4K stream over our 3.0 system for close to two years," emailed CEO Todd Achilles. With Evoca's carriage of Insight TV, "we are the only U.S. broadcaster with a full-time 4K channel over-the-air," he said. "HDR10+ is a new encoding format that offered more efficiency without sacrificing quality," said Achilles. "Collectively with Samsung and Harmonic, we encoded our 4K feed using HDR10+ and then watched it on a Samsung TV -- and everything worked great! This was just an initial test, but the results are very encouraging.”
Netflix has begun studying the possible rollout of lower-priced, ad-supported tiers as one way of restoring subscriber growth, said CEO Reed Hastings in a Q1 investor interview Tuesday. Netflix blamed its dismal Q1 results on the lack of an account-sharing monetization strategy, plus “pretty high market penetration” and intensified competition, all driving lower subscriber acquisitions.