CE Retailers Coalition members “have all invested significant resources in preparing for the Feb. 17 deadline,” Executive Director Christopher McLean told us in response to a question about the group’s position on postponing the analog TV cutoff. “Ultimately this is a government decision and retailers will do everything they can to help our customers understand and prepare for DTV transition,” he said. “Our members’ doors are open and are ready to help consumers with all their transition needs. Our members’ stores have stock on the shelf and on order.” The coalition would “welcome any effort to get coupons flowing again to consumers anxious to purchase converter boxes,” McLean said. It asks that “any extensions or expansions of the coupon program be compatible with systems put in place at great expense to process coupons,” he said. Asked why the coalition hadn’t spoken out on a possible delay, McLean said CERC members “have expressed individual views on the deadline.”
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.
Momentum to delay full-power broadcasters’ move to DTV picked up steam with support from President-elect Barack Obama. A Thursday letter from the co-head of his transition team to top lawmakers asked Congress to push back the Feb. 17 DTV switch, noting the NTIA’s digital converter box coupon program has run out of money. But the NTIA’s chief told us that Congress is coming up with legislation to let the agency send out more coupons. And FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, some legislators and industry groups said delay could cause consumer confusion.
NTIA by next week thinks it will “fully obligate” the $1.34 billion Congress appropriated for DTV coupons, Acting NTIA Administrator Meredith Baker told House Telecom Subcommittee Chairman Ed Markey, D-Mass., in a letter Friday. Responding to Markey’s call for a status report on the coupon program, Baker said reaching the $1.34 billion “ceiling” won’t mean the program has run out of money, but the NTIA will need to halt processing new coupon orders until money from expired coupons has been recycled back into the pool.
Raising its forecast by a million coupons from a projection in November, NTIA now expects to have accepted orders for 51.5 million DTV coupons when it stops taking applications March 31, but thinks the number easily could go higher, we've learned. Marking two months until the analog cutoff Feb. 17, the agency will announce this week that it has ordered a million more coupons from IBM, we're told.
CES hotel rates are plummeting faster than the consumer confidence index, but CEA’s top CES strategist said it would be foolhardy to chalk that all up to the sour economy. Las Vegas hotels’ slashing CES rates is a trend that CEA has seen before, most recently four years ago, when the economy was stronger, Karen Chupka, CEA vice president of shows and conferences, told Consumer Electronics Daily.
About 560 Sony Electronics employees at the company’s Pittsburgh Technology Center will be phased out as the facility closes in 16 months, Sony announced late Tuesday. The Pittsburgh center and a recorded media plant in France are the first two casualties of a Sony plan announced earlier in the day to close about 10 percent of the company’s 57 manufacturing sites as part of a bid to cut investment by 30 percent.
CEA downgraded its Q4 CE dollar shipments projection Thursday, saying it now thinks CE wholesale revenue will be flat compared with last year’s. In late October, CEA said it expected a 3.5 percent revenue increase Q4 compared with the 12.5 percent rise a year earlier (CED Oct 21 p1). CEA said it decided to downgrade the forecast “after analyzing newly available data, including final October shipment and revenue data and a new survey of Black Friday shoppers.” Weeks ago, many on the industry’s front lines, including Sony Electronics President Stan Glasgow, pooh-poohed the October forecast as much too upbeat (CED Nov 21 p1). But the group said Thursday that early October shipment data had given it grounds to be hopeful. Flat-panel TV shipments, for example, rose 32 percent in units and 8 percent in dollars in September from a year earlier, it said. New figures suggest that “holiday shoppers are opting for smaller, less expensive TVs and other CE products purchased at discount retailers,” CEA said.
D&M will combine Denon and Boston Acoustics in the U.S. under a single team Dec. 15 to “seamlessly integrate the sales and marketing operations of both brands,” the company said Thursday. Though the reorganization augurs “some reduction” in the D&M work force through the elimination of “duplicate positions,” the company would have made the moves even if there hadn’t been the economic downturn, Bob Weissburg, president of D&M Sales and Marketing, North America, told Consumer Electronics Daily.
There’s a strong possibility that tru2way can become a prominent DTV buzzword as more cable companies “upgrade their headends” for the OCAP feature, Sony Electronics President Stan Glasgow told reporters Thursday in New York. “The ability to have a system where you can move from one part of the country to another without having to buy a new cable box or a new television in the future is a positive thing,” he said. “And Sony wants to be part of that. We are working on that very hard.” But he wouldn’t comment when we asked whether Sony will introduce tru2way TVs in its Bravia LCD TV line at CES.
As Circuit City hurtled inevitably toward bankruptcy, “we did what we could to protect Sony in any possible way, yet support Circuit through the transition,” Sony Electronics President Stan Glasgow told reporters at a New York media briefing Thursday. “It’s a balancing act” that “took a lot of management attention and a lot of financial attention to minimize the potential damage it would have to Sony and at the same time make sure that we didn’t damage Circuit City,” said Glasgow.