The Digital Entertainment Group will restructure immediately to concentrate more on digital content delivery, Blu-ray and green issues, it said Thursday. “Most noteworthy” will be an “expansion directed at the digital media landscape, an area that has seen significant and steady growth in recent years,” it said.
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.
Best Buy got its fair share of the 34 million DTV coupons redeemed for converter boxes, and taking part in the program brought “consumers into the store who may not have been regular customers,” Executive Vice President Mike Vitelli told us Tuesday. That “allowed them to see that, like, ‘Wow, I didn’t realize that this is what TV has come into,'” he said. “We're all into it. We understand HDTV and flat-panel TV. But there’s tens of millions of people that actually hadn’t seen it.” Taking part in the government’s coupon program “was a way to get them in, when they might not have been in, because it’s not their thing,” Vitelli said. “They got to see it. So whether that turned into a purchase then or it turns into a purchase this season or next year, I think that was an opportunity to re-engage with a customer that might not have seen HDTV. That’s how we looked at it.”
Though Best Buy and Sony worked together nearly two years on the Altus wireless audio product line they introduced on Tuesday for September delivery, Sony owns the brand and the line won’t be exclusive to Best Buy, executives of the companies told reporters Tuesday in New York.
Panasonic swung to a $644 million net loss Q1 from a year-earlier profit, on a 26 percent sales decrease to $16.8 billion, the company said Monday. Panasonic also posted a $212 million operating loss in the quarter, compared with a year-earlier operating profit. It blamed the result mainly on competitive price erosion.
On a day that Sharp and Sony announced swings to significant first-quarter losses, the companies said Thursday they've agreed to form a joint venture to produce and sell 10th-generation LCD panels and modules. The venture, Sharp Display Products, will start Dec. 29 and will be fully funded by April 2011, when Sharp will own 66 percent and Sony the rest, the companies said.
The New York City councilman who wrote the city’s controversial e-waste law met with Sanitation Department officials July 13, trying to convince them that DSNY, not electronics manufacturers, should shoulder the burden of collecting e-waste from city residents door to door, executives from CEA and the ITT Council told us in an interview Monday. The groups have filed a lawsuit asking the U.S. District Court, Manhattan, to block implementation of the e-waste law (CED July 27 p1), especially this Friday’s deadline when manufacturers must file e-waste collection plans with the city or face $1,000-a-day fines for noncompliance.
New York City’s e-waste rules are illegal and unconstitutional and would “impose crushing costs and excessive burdens” on electronics manufacturers, CEA and the ITI Council alleged in a suit they filed Friday (CED July 27 p1). It asks the U.S. District Court in Manhattan to block the rules from taking effect and seeks a “critical” preliminary injunction to bar the city from enforcing a Friday deadline for manufacturers to file e-waste collection plans, on pain of $1,000 a day fines, the complaint said.
Silicon Image is “on track” to announce this quarter a promoters’ working group to support adoption of the Mobile High-Definition Link technology it introduced at the January 2008 CES, CEO Steve Tirado said in an earnings call Thursday. MHL is an AV interface technology for connecting portable CE devices to an HDTV set through the TV’s standard HDMI input. It connects portable consumer electronics devices -- such as mobile phones, digital cameras, camcorders and portable media players -- to HDTVs using a single cable connected to the TV’s standard HDMI input port. MHL-enabled devices will allow a user to view multimedia content in HD, in contrast to the poor image produced when the portable device is linked to the TV through standard analog connections, Silicon Image has said. The company has landed an MHL design win for a “major mobile phone OEM,” which will begin shipping the phone this quarter, Tirado said. He said the company has made its first MHL licensing deal, but he didn’t identify the licensee. Tirado said he expects MHL to take off when creation of the working group is publicized, like HDMI finally took off when Silicon Image posted the finished spec online. The company wants the MHL spec to come out this year, he said. With the recent announcement of the HDMI 1.4 spec, “we are starting to see customer silicon innovation, not just cost reduction,” Tirado said. HDMI 1.4 “lays the foundation for profound changes in the HD entertainment experience,” he said. “The addition of Ethernet inside the HDMI cable acknowledges the importance of continued cable consolidation and connecting the home theater stack.” With version 1.4, “HDMI certification has now embraced the trend in IP connectivity necessary for a whole new class of entertainment content, services and applications by including it in into the HDMI standard,” Tirado said. “At the same time, we're looking forward to future enhancements in picture quality that will come with 3-D movies and television. The HDMI standard now incorporates the necessary protocol changes to handle this important improvement in visual quality.”
Adding instant streaming has “broadened the appeal of Netflix,” CEO Reed Hastings said on an earnings call Thursday. It’s “driving growth in our most highly penetrated market,” the San Francisco Bay area, where nearly 21 percent of homes subscribe to Netflix, versus 9 percent nationally, Hastings said. “We believe the Bay area is a leading indicator of Internet behavior elsewhere in America and are thus encouraged by these large and growing penetration rates.”
Contrary to Harman High-Performance Audio Video assertions (CED July 23 p1), D&M doesn’t pressure its retailers to carry all the company’s product lines, Bob Weissburg, the president of D&M’s North American sales and marketing, told us Thursday. D&M “has crafted programs that benefit the dealer and consumers” through incentives that coax retailers that carry either Denon or Boston Acoustics to carry the other also, Weissburg said. There’s a similar program for Snell and McIntosh, he said. But no incentives are offered for Marantz dealers to carry Denon, or the other way around, and none of the brand pairings are required, Weissburg said. He said D&M’s approach differs from the one expressed by a Harman executive as seeking dealers “who get it” and accept the one-stop-solutions approach. “I can understand where Harman is coming from and I hope it works for them,” Weissburg said. But D&M is out to “earn more of the respect” of these dealers through one-on-one encounters that can expand the business into one that’s “beneficial” to the vendor and to the retailer and its customers, Weissburg said.