The DiiVA (Digital Interactive Interface for Video & Audio) Consortium said Thursday that four Samsung TV models in the UAXXD5500 series have passed compliance testing at the DiiVA test center in Guangzhou, China. “As the first non-Chinese TV manufacturer to join DiiVA as a promoter, Samsung is committed to playing an integral role in the new era for smart TVs and will continue to raise the bar for interactive TV experiences,” said Hong Sung Pyo, vice president of Samsung Electronics, Tianjin R&D Center.
Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby Digital were selected as optional technologies for China’s DTV receiver spec for set-top boxes and TVs that will take effect Nov. 1, Dolby Labs said. “We view this outcome as a positive for Dolby, as China this year will become the largest LCD TV market in the world,” said John Vinh, analyst for Collins Stewart. Near-term, the announcement isn’t expected to have any material impact on Dolby revenue because the technology has been selected as an optional specification, he said. Long term, however, he sees a “meaningful opportunity,” citing history in Europe where Dolby was not originally mandated as an audio spec but now commands a 90-plus percent market share. Over time, a similar scenario should play out in China since the company already has more than 15 broadcasters in China broadcasting in Dolby Digital, Vinh said. Among the Chinese broadcasters that have adopted Dolby Digital Plus are Shenzhen Media Group on terrestrial, Jinan Cable and BesTV for its IPTV platform, Dolby said. China-based IC companies NationalChip and HiSilicon are also incorporating Dolby Digital Plus into their chipsets for HD set-top boxes, Dolby said. More than 50 device makers including TCL, Changhong, Huawei, Juizhou and Coship have incorporated Dolby Digital Plus into their HD set-top boxes or HDTVs, it said. Using DisplaySearch research forecasting 60 million LCD TV units shipping in China in 2014, Vinh said a 70 percent attach rate would translate to about $0.25 per share in incremental earnings for Dolby. He cited concerns about “leakage and compliance” in China, but said the inclusion of Dolby in the official spec “will make it easier for the company to collect royalties.” Taking into account anticipated leakage, Vinh said, “We note that the company has successfully collected on royalties in China on DVD players for years.”
Amid a world gone streaming, Sony held a Blu-ray news briefing in New York Tuesday to reaffirm the relevance of the Blu-ray format now and in the future. Pushing the physical Blu-ray ecosystem over cloud-based content, executives from Sony -- a co-inventor of Blu-ray that’s involved in the format chain from content creation to playback -- made the case for Blu-ray’s recordability, flexibility, robustness and capacity. Darin Scott, senior vice president of marketing, said consumers these days want a choice in how they view content and Blu-ray is one of those options whether for a standalone player, PC or PS3. “With increased high-bandwidth content, expanding storage needs and flexible solutions are needed,” he said. Even VAIO laptops that record to hard disks need the “stability” of a recordable Blu-ray drive, he said.
Tennis fans at cinemas around the world, along with ESPN 3D TV viewers, can see 3D versions of Wimbledon semifinal and final matches this weekend either on TV or at a smattering of RealD theaters showing BBC coverage of the events.
Baker & Taylor, distributor of physical and digital books, said at last week’s American Library Association conference in New Orleans that it’s partnering with Barnes & Noble to build awareness among Nook e-reader customers that digital books are available for loan from local libraries. Nook owners who are members of libraries that are part of Baker & Taylor’s Axis 360 nascent digital media circulation management platform will be able to “check out” e-books from their library website, on loan, for temporary download to their Nooks or other digital reading devices, Michael Bills, director of sales, digital products for Baker & Taylor, told Consumer Electronics Daily. The Axis service will also link customers directly to the BN.com website for e-book content, he said.
Energy management won’t be a consumer-driven profit opportunity for the custom installation market anytime soon, according to panelists on “Pioneering Technologies for the Custom Integration Industry,” part of the Lifestyle Technology Summit in New York Friday.
Baker & Taylor, distributor of physical and digital books, said last week at the American Library Association conference in New Orleans that it is partnering with Barnes & Noble to build awareness among Nook e-reader customers that digital books are available for loan from local libraries. Nook owners who are members of libraries that are part of Baker & Taylor’s Axis 360 nascent digital media circulation management platform will be able to “check out” e-books from their library website, on loan, for temporary download to their Nooks or other digital reading devices, Michael Bills, director of sales, digital products for Baker & Taylor, told us. The Axis service will also link customers directly to the BN.com website for e-book content, he said.
Paraphrasing a recent FCC report on the decline of local news viewership, CEA CEO Gary Shapiro pointed attendees Thursday at “CE Week” to a section about how “the Internet has enabled an unprecedented free exchange of ideas and information” with the conclusion “we should push for universal broadband to help online businesses thrive.” As more smartphones are in the hands of consumers, more industries are created that “we couldn’t have dreamed of a decade ago,” he said. Social media and media-sharing sites are examples, he said. More videos are uploaded to YouTube in 60 days than the average three major TV networks created in 60 years, he said. He mentioned Cisco data, forecasting that traffic for wireless devices will exceed that of wired devices by 2014. Calling spectrum “the lifeblood of innovation,” Shapiro said if the industry doesn’t get more allocation “we'll have the World Wide Wait for all of our wireless devices.” Shapiro said the U.S. has to resist what other companies are proposing in terms of Internet regulation. He recently participated in the EG8 Summit, where French president Nicolas Sarkozy issued a plea for nations “to regulate the Internet to preserve political values” and what Shapiro called “other protectionist purposes.” In France “you're not allowed to say Twitter or Facebook on radio or TV,” he maintained, urging protection of First Amendment rights. Shapiro expressed concern about the U.S. government asserting broad powers on websites “it doesn’t like with very little or no judicial process.” Whether the issue is child pornography or intellectual property, hundreds of businesses are pulled offline mistakenly because “when they shut down websites, they shut down a lot more than they intended,” Shapiro said. “We have to be very careful to protect businesses against our own government’s efforts to develop new powers that hurt innovation and send the wrong message to regimes abroad that use our technology to spread their pro-democracy messages.”
Calling the consumer electronics industry a “bright spot in a very cloudy economy,” CEA CEO Gary Shapiro welcomed attendees Thursday to “CE Week” during a keynote in which he promoted passage of S-911. The bill was approved by the Senate Commerce Committee earlier this month. Wireless broadband is one of the primary drivers of the CE industry, Shapiro said. Many of the new products and services coming to market require wireless broadband, he said, making the “spectrum crunch one of the most critical technology policy issues we face today.” Much of the most attractive spectrum now is being used “as it has been for the last 40 or 50 years” by broadcasters, Shapiro said. Despite their “important service to the public,” the demand for wireless broadband services has exhausted all of the available spectrum, creating a “crisis” that can only be served by allocating additional frequencies for broadband, he said.
Vizio aims to be “disruptive” in the LED lamp business in the same way it hijacked the LED-based LCD TV market to reach the No. 1 sales position, co-founder Ken Lowe said on the “Green and Clean” panel late Wednesday at the CEA LineShows conference in New York. “We've already purchased 700 million LED chips to use in our televisions,” and some Vizio TVs “use as much as 1,000 LED chips,” he said.