LAS VEGAS -- LG thinks there’s a need for interim home 3-D standards to allow the introduction of content and hardware late this year that the company wants to see, said Nandhu Nandhakumar, the company’s senior vice president of advanced technology, Sunday at the NAB Show’s Digital Cinema Summit.
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.
There are “concerns about availability” of consumer antennas in the DTV transition, but that “probably is not a problem,” Hank Caskey, Audiovox vice president for reception products. He spoke at the Association for Maximum Service Television’s annual meeting Monday during the NAB show in Las Vegas. Audiovox, which sells RCA and Terk antennas to all the major CE retailers, has seen most accounts “substantially increasing the number of new antennas” this year, in some cases as much as 50 percent from last year, Caskey said. Some models are on back order at some retailers, said Robert Schwartz, counsel to the CE Retailers Coalition. “Retailers were not tuned into antennas for a while,” but it has recently been a thriving business marked by “high return rates,” including a “mild spike” in antenna returns after Feb. 18, he said. What will happen to converter-box demand as the hard analog cutoff approaches June 12 is, like the converter-box program itself, “uncharted territory,” Schwartz said. Retailers will be torn between having enough boxes in stock to meet any spikes in demand and trying to be sure they don’t get stuck with 250 boxes in stock the day demand falls to zero, Schwartz said. Converter boxes “don’t make very good coral reefs,” he said, adding that some retailers will be “more agile than others in dealing with this.”
Atlanta, Seattle and Washington, D.C., will be the first mobile DTV launch markets this year, the Open Mobile Video Coalition said at the NAB show Monday in Las Vegas. At least two stations in each market will participate in the launch at the start, ION Media President Brandon Burgess told a standing-room-only OMVC breakfast meeting. Burgess is OMVC president. “We need to make this part of our future,” said John Eck, president of the NBC TV network and Media Works. Eck said Washington would have the largest roster of participating stations at the start. Six stations there are signed on, including the NBC, Fox and ION affiliates as well as two PBS stations, Eck said. Responding to an audience questioner on how many mobile DTV stations will be possible in each of the launch markets, Burgess said Sinclair and Telemundo teamed to build an “example infrastructure” to broadcast mobile DTV in Las Vegas during the NAB show. Three stations in all are involved in the set-up, and they're capable of transmitting 10 channels, Burgess said. “That shows what only three stations can do.” One station owner at the breakfast estimated it takes a $50,000 to $150,000 investment to convert a station for mobile DTV, but said the money was well worth it. Not only is there vast “audience potential” in mobile DTV, but “the market is moving, and moving toward mobile,” said Colleen Brown of Fisher Communications. “We need to be in that space. We can’t disenfranchise those viewers.” LG plans to debut a DVD portable with built-in mobile ATSC tuner by the end of the year, executive Bob Rast said. They're to go along with introductions of modified LG Maize, Voyager 1000 and Lotus cellphones announced at CES and the recent CTIA trade shows, he said. Samsung regrets that it doesn’t yet have any “toys to show,” but company engineers are working to get new prototypes ready, said executive John Godfrey. Dell said it plans to introduce a Mini 10 netbook computer modified with an added mobile ATSC tuner sometime this year in the U.S. using chips sourced from LG Semiconductor, which has announced plans to mass produce the devices beginning in June. Dell will introduce a version of the Mini 10 next month in Europe with Vodafone as a partner. It likely will partner with another company when it introduces the Mini 10 in the U.S., it said.
Chris McLean, the CE Retailers Coalition’s executive director, remains “confident” there'll be “sufficient supplies” of DTV converter boxes “to meet demand as we approach the transition date” of June 12, he told us Monday in an e-mail. He was commenting on letters House Commerce Committee leaders sent last week to Best Buy and other retailers and manufacturers seeking CE industry assurances that there'll be enough boxes to go around (CED April 13 p7). “However, as I testified before the FCC, there will certainly be individual outlets that may be out of stock on any given day,” McLean said. “The message to consumers is to shop now and get their transition behind them before the deadline.”
Best Buy didn’t respond right away to requests for comment on a letter the House Commerce Committee leadership sent CEO Brad Anderson Thursday seeking answers to six questions about the chain’s DTV converter box inventories. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the committee chairman, and Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., chairman of the Communications Subcommittee, signed the letter, which aides said was also sent to other retailers and CE manufacturers. At the subcommittee’s March 26 hearing (CED March 27 p1), “there was concern that the supply of coupon-eligible converter boxes (CECBs) would be inadequate to meet demand,” the letter said. Estimates given at the hearing on the number of boxes that would be purchased between April and June “would appear to underestimate demand if current converter box coupon redemption rates hold,” the letter said, without mentioning by name CEA’s forecast that 4.2 million boxes would be sold in that period. “We seek information that will enable us to determine whether there will be an adequate supply of CECBs to satisfy demand,” Waxman and Boucher said. They asked Anderson to answer by April 24 six questions and give updates every three weeks thereafter. They want to know how many CECBs Best Buy has in stock or on order, whether it placed new orders since Feb. 1, and whether it plans to order more between now and Oct. 31, which is about when the last coupons -- those issued July 31 -- will be due to expire. Their bottom-line question: “Are you confident that your company will have enough CECBs to meet demand between now and October 31, 2009?” CEA President Gary Shapiro, in a Friday e-mail, didn’t comment directly on the letter, but said he thinks it’s part of an “information-gathering” effort that Boucher discussed at the March 26 hearing. CEA has not revised its estimate that 4.2 million CECBs will be sold between April and June, Shapiro said.
Some would-be vendors vying for one of six regional FCC contracts to perform “basic in-home converter box installation services” want to know if they'll be required to serve an entire region or just a single state within that region. That’s according to the nine pages worth of questions, released Tuesday, that bidders posed on the commission’s request for quotes. The commission is using part of the $90 million set aside in the economic stimulus package for DTV “education and outreach” to pay for the contracts (CED March 30 p3). The contracts also could represent a timely windfall for AV installers hurting for work amid the economic crisis.
Stringent guidelines await retailers seeking to work with nonprofits and community groups in getting coupons and DTV converter boxes to consumers who might need them, according to a new posting at the NTIA’s retailer site. The guidelines could figure prominently as the coupon program draws to a close this summer and retailers may seek ways to dispense with an oversupply of converter boxes.
Sony Electronics is reorganizing its U.S. sales and marketing operations and installing new leadership, it told retailers Friday. Chief Marketing Officer Mike Fasulo will lead all sales and marketing functions, President Stan Glasgow told dealers in a “Dear Sony Retail Partner” letter. Senior Vice Presidents Ken Stevens and Paul Spitale will be responsible for Sony’s national accounts and its regional and specialty accounts, respectively, while Jay Vandenbree, consumer sales president, has opted for Sony’s early retirement offer and will soon leave the company, Glasgow said.
The major studios, working together, reduced the carbon footprint of the average DVD by 11 percent from 2006 to 2008, Larry Wilk, the Digital Entertainment Group’s “green ambassador” and vice president of worldwide operations for Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, told a DEG Green Webinar Thursday. That’s well ahead of Wal-Mart’s target three years ago when it asked suppliers to reduce their carbon footprints 5 percent by 2013, Wilk said.
Funai’s opposition to Vizio’s request for temporary relief on DTV patents failed to disclose that two days before Funai’s filing, the Patent and Trademark Office had rejected the company’s claims on its “'074” patent as invalid, Vizio said in a reply filed Monday at the FCC. Vizio is asking the commission to accept its unusual reply into the case record because it’s “limited to new matters raised” in Funai’s opposition, Vizio said (CED April 1 p6). The PTO’s decision March 11 on the ‘074 patent doesn’t square with an International Trade Commission finding that the patent is valid and Vizio infringed it, Vizio said. It said the “validity of the ‘074 patent, and any claims that Funai is making under that patent, is very much in question.” Funai’s outside counsel, Cheryl Tritt, didn’t reply right away to an e-mail seeking comment.