Epiq Systems, a member of the IBM-led team that won the $120 million contract to run NTIA’s DTV coupon program (CED Aug 16 p1), declined our request for an interview. Consulting with NTIA, Epiq was told that the contract bars Epiq from discussing the coupon program with reporters, said Myriam Schmell, vice president of sales for the company’s class action and claims solutions business.
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.
BERLIN -- IFA organizers may boast that their show is the world’s biggest CE trade fair (CED Aug 30 p1), but CES actually deserves that honor, CEA President Gary Shapiro told an IFA news conference Saturday. “The results speak for themselves,” Shapiro said. CES is “the world’s largest consumer technology trade show,” he said.
BERLIN - “I'm still puzzled at the reason why they did it and the way they did it,” Philips Consumer Electronics CEO Rudy Provoost, in an IFA interview Friday with Consumer Electronics Daily, said of Paramount’s decision to support HD DVD only (CED Aug 21 p1). “Every scenario has a degree of probability,” and Paramount’s dropping its Blu-ray support “didn’t rank very high on my scale of probability,” Provoost told us.
BERLIN -- Toshiba promised Paramount and DreamWorks Animation “some money” to cover costs “to jointly promote” their titles, in a deal for the studios to support HD DVD and not Blu-ray (CED Aug 21 p1), Toshiba’s top HD DVD executive told Consumer Electronics Daily at IFA Friday. But reports that Toshiba paid the studios $150 million for their support are “totally wrong,” Yoshihide Fujii, CEO of Toshiba’s Digital Network Co., said without elaborating.
BERLIN -- Thursday was unofficial Blu-ray Day at IFA, and backers used a Blu-ray Disc Association news conference to claim their format’s hardware and title superiority over HD DVD. HD DVD takes the IFA stage Friday with afternoon news conferences by Toshiba and the HD DVD Promotional Group, with competition from a noon Hitachi news conference expected to introduce its Blu-ray camcorders to the European market.
BERLIN -- The three leading CE trade shows, CES in the U.S., CEATEC in Japan and IFA in Europe, constitute “a reasonable split around the world,” Rainer Hecker, chairman of the supervisory board of IFA sponsor GFU, told the opening IFA news conference Wednesday. “From that point of view, we are not in a direct competition” with CES, Hecker said.
The cable and CE industries gave little new ground two- way plug-and-play in comments filed in a new FCC rulemaking aimed at breaking their impasse. Talks aimed at a compromise have been deadlocked for years, sometimes bitterly, and now the DTV deadline is approaching.
Sony doesn’t expect states and municipalities to bear the cost of separating its junk and carting it to Waste Management drop-off sites under the Sony Take Back Recycling program, a Sony Electronics spokesman said. He was responding to comments Friday by Scott Cassel, executive director of the Product Stewardship Institute, which advises state and local officials on recycling (CED Aug 27 p5). Cassel had praised the Sony program as “a step forward” but said it won’t solve states’ TV waste problems. Sony never intended for states to arrange and pay for getting discarded Sony products to the Waste Management sites, the spokesman said. “Our assumption at this stage is that consumers will bring the heavier items there directly,” he said. Consumers also can ship to the sites junked products, presumably smaller ones, he said. Old Sony products can be recycled for free, Sony has said. “Also we are hopeful that other manufacturers will join the program so their products will be recycled for free as well,” the spokesman said.
Digeo is “on track” to deliver its first two Moxi- branded “digital media receivers” (DMRs) to retail this fall (CED Special CES Supplement Jan 8 p3), CEO Mike Fidler told Consumer Electronics Daily. Digeo will showcase the DMRs at next week’s CEDIA Expo in Denver, he said. But pricing, delivery dates, retail partners’ names and other details await a “post-CEDIA” announcement likely to precede the holiday, he said.
Sample shipments have started of NXP’s four-input HDMI 1.3 receiver chip (CED Aug 24 p8) and mass production is set to begin in January, an NXP spokeswoman said. NXP is producing the chip itself using a “CMOS 18” process rather than sourcing it from a supplier, she said. The chip has a maximum clock speed of 225 MHz and has both RAM and ROM onboard, she said.