LA QUINTA, Calif. -- Summer may bring “interesting solutions” for DRM interoperability, a major condition for mass acceptance of digital downloads, Benn Carr, Disney Studios vice president of new technology, told the Content Delivery and Storage Association conference Friday. He wouldn’t elaborate in Q-and-A.
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.
HD DVD’s death leads some to think “the war is over” and that Blu-ray won, but “from our perspective, the battle really begins now,” Sony Electronics President Stan Glasgow told reporters in a Wednesday briefing in New York. “We've got to convince people of the value of high-definition and begin to move people more away from DVD into the high- definition world to see what’s really going on there,” he said.
CEA wishes the long-awaited FCC DTV consumer education order gave CE makers more time to comply, a spokesman told Consumer Electronics Daily Tuesday. The rules were released late Monday.
In the NTIA DTV coupon program contract IBM landed last August (CED Aug 16 p1), the vendor proposed designing a coupon mailer “such that it stands out among the onslaught of mail any consumer might receive.” IBM’s “solution envisions multi-color highlights and call-to-action statements on the exterior envelope,” its contract proposal said. Instead, IBM is mailing the coupons in a white envelope with the program’s “TV Converter Box” logo in black and white in the return address. “After speaking with experts, it was decided to use the TV Converter Box Coupon Program name and logo on the mailer to make it clear who was sending the mailer but not for it to stand out so much so that it invited the theft of coupons,” an NTIA spokesman told us Monday.
XM can’t give “assurances” on the “timing or outcome” of a government decision on the proposed merger with Sirius, but “we expect and we continue to look forward to a timely and positive resolution of the regulatory approval process,” Chairman Gary Parsons told analysts Thursday in a quarterly earnings call.
Sony gave retailers “plenty of advance notice” it was quitting the rear-projection TV category, so they could make new selections and reset their sales floors, Jeff Goldstein, vice president of TV marketing, told reporters Tuesday at the company’s line show in Las Vegas. It’s hard to see how Sony could have done a better job of exiting the business, he said. The microdisplay-based rear-projection TV trade “will continue to shrink, and I think we're really capitalizing on the opportunity to utilize all our resources against where we see the growth in the market,” Goldstein said. “It was the right time for us to make that decision and it will prove out to be the right decision in the long run.” Sony is “relaunching” its Bravia Internet Video Link to be sure that “we're really talking about the most compelling aspects” of the technology, he said. “We know that it’s content-driven,” Goldstein said. “We know that we have new content partners that will drive awareness in the product. So we're working with retailers and doing focus groups to kind of study around our next-gen messaging.” Rob Jacobs, senior business development director, said Bravia Internet Video Link, now 15 channels, could add 50 within months. “Jaws dropped” when Sony shared Internet viewing data with content partners, said Edgar Tu, Sony vice president of TV engineering. Some content rated more highly viewed over Bravia Internet Video Link than over a PC, Tu said. It would be overkill for Sony to build the Cell microprocessor into TVs, as Toshiba has said it will do in its 2009 line, he said in Q-and-A. The Cell “was very much designed for a very high-powered system” like the PS3, Tu said. “I'm not sure, but I think it’s way overpowered for a television.” Sony “may actually get to a time when we could utilize the full power of the Cell” in a TV, he said. “By that time, I know of no compelling reasons why not to do it.” But Sony sees no application “that would warrant usage of the Cell” in its TVs, Tu said.
Sirius and XM think “we have made the case” that merging the satellite radio networks “serves the public interest,” Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin told analysts Tuesday in a quarterly earnings call. Sirius and XM weren’t able to achieve their goal of closing the merger in 2007, the companies still “look forward to a fast, positive ruling from the government,” he said.
LAS VEGAS -- Sony executives at the company’s first line show here since HD DVD died aren’t fazed by predictions that though Blu-ray won the format war, its success is far from assured as long as hardware costs so much, they said.
DTV coupon requests shot up 22 percent for the week ended Friday, breaking the 6-million mark, NTIA data showed. Consumers requested 1,088,549 coupons -- the most a week since just after NTIA began accepting applications Jan. 1. Total requests since Jan. 1 reached 6,048,365.
Consumers requested just under 380,000 DTV converter box coupons in the week ended Friday, the NTIA said, raising total requests to 4.96 million since the government began accepting applications Jan. 1. The total is 22.3 percent of the 22.25 million coupons that NTIA has budgeted for the “base” phase of the program, when all households are eligible for coupons. A “contingency” phase, if needed, would allot 11.25 million coupons to households that certify they depend on over-the-air signals alone for TV.