Bose Unveils First Video Product: $5,000 Integrated TV With Complete Audio/Video System Inside

During demos at the Four Seasons hotel in New York Tuesday, company officials repeatedly referred to the spaciousness of the sound, taking care not to refer to the system as surround sound. The VideoWave entertainment system arrives in Bose stores in the U.S. Oct. 14, the company said, along with Bose retail locations in Europe and other areas worldwide. Bose said its stores offer the best demo opportunities and customer training opportunities, which Phil Hess, vice president of product marketing in the home entertainment division, told Consumer Electronics Daily is critical to the success of the pricey product in a highly discounted category. For now, the VideoWave is a Bose store exclusive, and the company will evaluate expanded distribution over the next six months, Hess said. “First, we have to communicate the value because by every appearance it’s a TV,” he said, noting that a comparably priced LCD -- without the sound system or product integration -- sells for about $1,000.

The $5,349 includes the “white-glove delivery service” for set up, connection to source components, and 30-60 seconds of training, Hess said. The company will also take away the customer’s old TV. A company spokeswoman said Bose is working with a third-party to ensure old televisions are recycled “in an environmentally responsible manner."

Hess said there are two schools of thought on the price of the system. “You cost-up to afford the parts you're putting in,” he said, and costs for the LCD technology, home theater, music and remote control are significant, he said. The market price is another matter. “Pricing isn’t a science,” he said. Consumers who see value in the benefits of VideoWave will pay the price, which will support future product research, he said. “When consumers don’t buy our products that means we haven’t put enough value in it,” he said. “Consumers will vote.” There’s no question VideoWave “isn’t for all customers,” he said, but the company believes there are customers “tired of seeing speakers and wires and too many remote controls” who will understand the value.

The system incorporates “a decade of research,” according to Carvajal. The integrated technologies include a six-woofer array for bass and a custom-designed Waveguide leveraging the company’s existing Wave technology. The challenge in a TV cabinet, Carvajal said, was to make a Waveguide thin enough for a product designed to hang on a wall and to minimize vibration that could interfere with the sensitive LCD panel. The woofers were mounted in a way that they would cancel each other’s vibration, Carvajal said, and are housed in a magnesium case.

For high frequencies, Bose designed a new sound radiator technology called Bose PhaseGuide that combines a seven-element speaker array coupled with a tube that ports out to the room through mesh openings in the TV cabinet. Listeners hear sound from the first reflection point, Carvajal said, rather than from the location of the port. The two PhaseGuides in the TV cabinet work with the speakers and Bose digital signal processing “to create sound from locations where there are no speakers,” he said. The system also incorporates a new version of Bose’s ADAPTiQ audio-calibration technology that adjusts the sound to the size, shape and characteristics of a room. ADAPTiQ was essential for the system, he said, because buyers will place the TV where it’s best for viewing, not best for sound.

According to Carvajal, only one-third of U.S. households connect their TVs to a home theater sound system because of complicated setup and operation. Bose saw an opportunity to target that market with a product that “minimizes complexity,” he said. Central to the system is the click pad learning remote control, which uses a minimum number of hard buttons for the most commonly used functions including power, volume and channel up and down, last channel, source select, mute and a navigation pad with select button. Once a source is selected, only the remote functions for that source appear on screen, the company said. According to Ken Jacob, Bose research engineer, the company researched how consumers used their remote controls at home using “IR sniffers” to record the activities people do most with their remotes and selected those functions for hard buttons. When users touch the click pad area on the remote, other remote functions for the device being operated appear around the on-screen interface, without interfering with the program. Users click on a function such as page up or down or a number to activate a command. With the buttons appearing on screen rather than on the remote, users don’t have to refocus going from the remote to the screen, Carvajal said. He maintained that “anyone can pick up and use” the simplified remote, solving the problem of many households where only one or two members know how to operate a home theater system.

Up to five HD video source components can be connected to the system, Carvajal said, and the console includes an iPod dock. A single, proprietary Bose cable connects the console to the TV. the system uses Unify, a Bose technology that allowed engineers to customize user interfaces for the TV’s display. When a component such as a Blu-ray player, Apple TV or cable box is connected to the console, the system automatically recognizes it “in 99.9 percent of cases,” according to Bose president Bob Maresca, and the component is identified on the on-screen GUI when users press the source button on the remote. The Bose remote still has to learn the commands of the product’s original remote control, however. During setup, users follow on-screen commands to press 5-10 buttons from the original remote until the component codes are recognized by the system, officials said.

Bose plans to sell the system as a no-compromise audio system as well, Carvajal said, and the company designed a video mute feature that turns off the display when users want to listen to an iPod or other music source without distraction. To engage the function, users press and hold the power button for two seconds to turn display off. “It’s a great music system that has no visible speakers,” he said. Maresca said the talk at Bose is that the audio system in the Video Wave is the company’s “biggest advancement in sound” since the seminal model 901 loudspeaker.

Maresca said the company chose a conventional LCD TV with CCFL backlight versus LED lighting because “there’s not much difference in fluorescent backlighting versus LED in terms of performance,” he said. LED offers the advantage of a thinner panel, he said, which wasn’t something the company needed to consider given its 6-inch depth to accommodate audio components. “We're not going for the thinnest panel,” he said, “so it would add more cost with no benefit.” Maresca wouldn’t disclose the panel maker, other than to say it was “one of the top high-end manufacturers,” but he said the relationship was important because as technology changes in panels, “we're going to be working with them to make sure the attach points don’t change and we can incorporate new things as panel technology changes."

Bose officials conceded that the $5,000-plus price point will be a challenge. “We put a lot of technology into this, and the price reflects it,” Hess said, saying now it’s about seeing how the market reacts. “If the pain point is larger than we imagined, we're going to have a high-class back-order problem,” he said. “If it’s smaller than we imagined, we'll have good market learning and the technology is transferable to other products we'll do."

According to Maresca, the company made a significant investment in building the database and the engine to recognize the clicks from third-party remote controls so the system can integrate the codes and put control screens on the TV. Having to update that database will be a challenge for a company used to building an audio product that “doesn’t require maintenance.” The database needs to be updated every time a new product comes out, Maresca said, and customers will have to download updates from the Bose website and then upload them to the system using a USB port on the front of the console. In response to our question regarding whether the company considered an Internet-connected TV that would provide a more direct upgrade path for consumers, along with applications, Maresca said, “There was thought to it, but then you're vulnerable to viruses. We decided to keep it simple.”

According to Gregg Duthaler, program manager, it will be a challenge to keep up with the TV industry “that moves very quickly.” He said the panel was designed to be flexible to afford “latitude in aligning with ongoing development in the industry.” Duthaler wouldn’t comment on the possibility of an Internet TV but he said third-party products such as DVRs and Blu-ray players offer that capability to users. “We'll let the third-party companies deal with that complexity, and we'll focus on the Unity technology that integrates products.