Sony Chief Marketing Officer Mike Fasulo remains “cautiously optimistic” in his holiday selling season outlook, based on the results of a Black Friday week that exceeded the company’s expectations, he told us in an interview Friday. Black Friday week “was really strong,” though the same can’t be said for the day after Thanksgiving, Fasulo said. “The momentum continues.” Sony sold about half a million Bravia LCD TVs during Black Friday week, a “much better” outcome than the same period a year earlier, he said. Though Sony sold “a lot” of Bravia LCD TVs in 32- and 40-inch sizes, its bundling of 46-inch Bravias with PS3 was “a huge hit in the market,” he said. Sony also is experiencing strong sales in categories that had recently been lackluster, including digital imaging products and “step-up” Vaio PC models, he said. “When you're doing well, everything is clicking at the same time,” Fasulo said. If he has any “concerns,” it’s for the long-term viability of the independents, Fasulo said. “But we're doing something about it,” he said, referring to the MAP program Sony installed last month that’s “starting to pay dividends” for independents who sell Sony as a step-up line.
Paul Gluckman
Paul Gluckman, Executive Senior Editor, is a 30-year Warren Communications News veteran having joined the company in May 1989 to launch its Audio Week publication. In his long career, Paul has chronicled the rise and fall of physical entertainment media like the CD, DVD and Blu-ray and the advent of ATSC 3.0 broadcast technology from its rudimentary standardization roots to its anticipated 2020 commercial launch.
No “constitutional injuries” to CE companies can be assessed until after manufacturers and New York City “come together over specific plans” for collecting and recycling e- waste, said the New York State Association for Solid Waste Management and other groups, in an amicus brief filed Dec. 1 and posted Tuesday that backs the city in its legal fight against CEA and the ITI Council. The court can’t evaluate makers’ claims that New York City’s e-waste program and its direct collection requirement will cause them irreparable harm “before some practical plan for collection and recovery has been presented and either approved or rejected by the city,” said the brief, which was signed by five others, including the governments of San Francisco and Portland, Ore. “The doctrine of constitutional avoidance requires the courts to refrain upon ruling upon questions of constitutional law when such rulings can be avoided, or narrowed through an administrative process,” it said. CE makers filed their lawsuit July 24, days before they were required to file elaborate e-waste collection plans with the city. If the court sides with the city and turns down CE makers’ request for a preliminary injunction, the city has agreed not to require the collection plans to be filed for 30 days after the ruling. Under the city’s e-waste law, the submission of e-waste collection and recycling plans, “and the reaction of city officials to those submitted plans, will identify the precise constitutional issues requiring resolution, if any such issues remain,” the brief said. “A ruling by this court that prevents that process from occurring will address constitutional issues that may not ultimately require resolution, and will almost certainly require a broader ruling than the developed facts will ultimately require.”
CE makers’ claims that New York City’s e-waste program will cause them “irreparable harm” and cost them more than $200 million a year to comply with “stand unrebutted,” CEA and the ITI Council said Friday in the latest filing in their lawsuit that asks the U.S. District Court, Manhattan, for a preliminary injunction to prevent the program from taking effect.
The Blu-ray Disc Association’s board will approve as soon as next Friday, Dec. 11, its final specification book and logo guidelines for a Blu-ray 3-D technical standard, clearing the way for products to be introduced some time in 2010, sources familiar with the work told Consumer Electronics Daily. The BDA’s board and its technical committees are scheduled to hold their regular meetings most of next week in the San Jose area, with Apple as the host, we're told.
CEA officials insisted in a Wednesday media briefing that the CE industry could suffer “immediate” harms from the California Energy Commission’s (CEC) newly approved regulations on TV energy use (CED Nov 19 p1) and that a lawsuit to stop the rules from taking effect was one of several “legislative and legal” options they would pursue. Yet the officials stood by their claims that even if CEA decided to take the CEC to court, no lawsuit was imminent.
Many logistical details remain to be worked out about LG’s plan to work with Waste Management’s WM Recycle America subsidiary to take back and recycle unwanted TVs and computer monitors from hotels, executives of the companies said Monday at the International Hotel/Motel & Restaurant Show in New York.
Though they filed a lawsuit to stop New York City’s e- waste program from taking effect, neither CEA nor the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) “is challenging the concept of producer responsibility,” CEA President Gary Shapiro and ITI President Dean Garfield said in a joint statement Thursday. They were commenting on a letter that 50 local and state government officials from 18 states sent the trade groups earlier in the day asking them to withdraw their lawsuit against New York City’s e-waste program. The lawsuit is “a direct challenge to state and local government efforts to protect public health and the environment,” the letter said.
Panasonic is on track to deliver its first 3-D Blu-ray players and plasma TVs in 2010, if Blu-ray’s 3-D standards and the HDMI 1.4 specs are finished on time by the end of this year, Eisuke Tsuyuzaki, the chief technology officer of Panasonic North America, said at the Blu-Con 2.0 conference Tuesday in Beverly Hills, Calif.
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. -- The industry has reached “a very, very critical period for Blu-ray” that will determine whether the format can hit an “inflection point” and become a mass-market product, Mike Vitelli, the executive vice president of Best Buy’s customer operations group, said in a keynote at the Blu-Con 2.0 conference.
Panasonic and Sony provided hints of economic recovery Friday by announcing that they had upgraded their profit forecasts for the year ending in March. But Toshiba left its forecast unchanged because, it said, the global economic outlook for the year’s second half “and afterward is still very unclear.” The companies posted quarterly sales declines well into double digits.