Best Buy shares were up over 13% in late-afternoon trading Tues. on the company’s announcement that first- quarter earnings climbed 49% and that the chain has upgraded its profit forecast for the year.
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 shares were up over 13% in late-afternoon trading Tues. on the company’s announcement that first- quarter earnings climbed 49% and that the chain has upgraded its profit forecast for the year.
Contrary to what many believe, the FCC does have “an enforcement plan in place” for compliance with the DTV tuner mandate, Alan Stillwell, assoc. chief of the Commission’s Office of Engineering & Technology, told Consumer Electronics Daily. With the Commission’s rejection of the CE industry petition to scrap the 50% compliance deadline on 25-36” sets (CED June 10 p1), “we're going to continue that same plan -- probably a little more aggressively,” Stillwell said.
Boston Acoustics (BA) will join Denon, Marantz, McIntosh and Snell in the D&M Holdings stable of specialty audio brands under a $76 million definitive merger agreement announced Thurs. The deal is expected to close by Aug. 31, after shareholder and regulatory approvals.
LOS ANGELES -- All hope isn’t necessarily lost for unifying behind a single next-generation format, panelists at a discussion on DVD’s longevity told the Digital Media Summit here Tues. However, they agreed development work on the individual Blu-ray and HD DVD systems must proceed under the assumption a compromise won’t be reached and the formats will go to war when they reach the consumer market late this year and in 2006.
LOS ANGELES -- Movies and recorded music wouldn’t have flourished as they have but for the “absence of more and better legal alternatives,” a key Microsoft executive told the Digital Media Summit here Tues. It therefore behooves Hollywood to “move the digital landscape to the right balance” between legal and unauthorized content by providing more legal avenues to access content online, Andy Moss, Microsoft dir. of technical policy, told a panel discussion entitled, “The Piracy Epidemic: Hollywood at War.”
CEA and the Consumer Electronics Retailers Coalition (CERC) unholstered their big guns last week in meetings with FCC Chmn. Martin and others to press their petition to scrap the July 1 deadline by which 50% of 25-36” TV sets must have ATSC tuning, it was disclosed in an ex parte filing.
Toshiba Fri. followed the HD DVD party line to repudiate Panasonic’s claims to the major studios -- first reported in Consumer Electronics Daily (CED June 2 p1) -- that “no manufacturing feasibility” has been established for the replication of triple-layer 45-GB HD DVD ROM discs. But its rebuttal didn’t specifically respond to Panasonic’s allegations that not only does the 45-GB HD DVD require tolerances unheard of in the replication world, it’s based on manufacturing processes that haven’t been developed yet.
Rex Stores is willing to sacrifice some margins to aggressive pricing on LCD, DLP and plasma TVs, given that “price points have fallen to a level that is now attractive to our customer base,” CEO Stuart Rose said Thurs. on release of the chain’s first quarter results.
There has been “no manufacturing feasibility” established for the replication of triple-layer 45-GB HD DVD ROM discs, Panasonic has told the major studios in the last few weeks in an effort to debunk Toshiba’s recent claims to the contrary, according to studio sources familiar with those discussions.
Conciliatory language continues to mix with bellicosity in the struggle to unify Blu-ray and HD DVD. Days after a war of words between the camps escalated, boosting likelihood of a 2006 format battle at retail (CED May 27 p3), Toshiba CEO Tadashi Okamura again proffered an olive branch, telling reporters all hope for unification isn’t lost.