First-half unit volume declined 13 percent in Technicolor’s disc-replication business, and revenue fell 9 percent, said CEO Frederic Rose Wednesday. The first half had “two different trends” in the “very strong declines” in standard-definition DVDs, coupled with “very strong growth” in Blu-ray, he said. “Obviously, the Blu-ray volume does not compensate” for the decline in standard-definition, “but Blu-ray from a profitability efficiency standpoint is a lot more interesting to the bottom line,” he said. Technicolor finished the “onboarding” of Sony’s outsourced replication business in the U.S. and Australia in Q2, he said. The business became “fully operational” under Technicolor’s watch at the start of Q3, said Rose. “All contract renewals moving forward” in the disc business will be “implemented only on volume- and activity-based pricing structures, thereby ensuring that Technicolor does not assume the volume risks of what happens in the market,” he said.
Sony announced its latest flagship Ultra Blu-ray player, saying Monday the UBP-X1100ES is selling at Amazon, Best Buy and other dealers for $599. Features include HDR10, Dolby Vision and hybrid log gamma HDR support, Dolby Atmos, DTS:X and 4K upscaling to 60 frames per second. The Hi-Res Audio player spins most discs, including Super Audio CDs, and has Digital Sound Enhancement Engine XS to upscale the frequency range and dynamic range of digital files to “near high-resolution quality,” it said.
Big Library Read, which bills itself as the world’s largest digital book club, said Monday that consumers can borrow the A Dangerous Act of Kindness e-book by LP Fergusson from its public library “with no waitlists or holds.” Readers can join Big Library Read through their local library’s website or by downloading the Libby App and then borrowing the title using a valid library card. They can discuss the book online at a discussion website. More than 19,000 libraries around the world participate in the program, facilitated by Rakuten OverDrive. The e-book can be read on all major computers and devices, and readers can also send titles to Kindle devices in the U.S. The title, the 19th in the three-times-a-year program, automatically expires July 1, the end of the lending period, said the club.
The Wireless Speaker and Audio Association certified Norway-based EC Living’s Tana L-2 wireless speaker, the group announced Monday. The Tana L-2 can work with a WiSA Certified or WiSA Ready source connected to a certified USB transmitter, it said. The Tana-2, due out in Norway this summer at $880 each, uses Class AB amplifiers and signal processing. EC Living is a division of Electrocompaniet.
Technicolor’s disc replication business “bluntly” had a “very tough” 2018, said CEO Frederic Rose on a Q4 call Wednesday. Overall physical-media unit volume, including CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays, were down 11 percent from 2017, which “I don’t think is a surprise to anybody,” he said. Standard-definition DVDs fell 17 percent to 787 million discs, while Blu-ray units increased 12 percent to 342 million, he said. Ultra HD Blu-ray is growing, and that’s “helping to offset, in Blu-ray at least, weaknesses in some of the other segments” of disc replication, he said. Profit for the year in disc replication took a “very material” hit, partly on “a very significant downturn from one major customer in their SD catalog volume expectations” late in Q4, he said. For 2019, “there’s not much we can do about the volumes, we’re living with that,” said Rose. One strategy for late in the year will emphasize the “renewal of customer contracts” that begin expiring in early 2020, he said. “We have every major studio in North America as our customer and the largest platform in the world. What we now need to do is convince our customers to move to volume-based pricing up and down, so that Technicolor no longer takes the risk of an income structure with volumes that move faster than we can adapt.” Technicolor also needs to change its “pricing rate card” to suit customer-distribution trends that have changed radically in the past five years, said Rose: “Very small packaged orders of 10 to 20 DVDs cost as much to process as 10,000 DVDs, so obviously, we need to change that.”
U.K. home entertainment software retailer HMV entered administration for the second time in its history, confirmed parent Hilco Capital Friday. It blamed HMV's financial troubles on “extremely weak” holiday sales and the “further deterioration” in U.K. demand for physical CDs and DVDs. HMV’s 125 stores across the U.K. “will continue to trade whilst negotiations are on-going with the major suppliers in the music and movie industries,” said Hilco. It’s also seeking buyers for the HMV business “as a going concern,” it said. “In the six years since the HMV business was rescued from a previous Administration process," the company "has captured market share from all of its competitors,” said Hilco Executive Chairman Paul McGowan. “It is disappointing to see the market, particularly for DVD, deteriorate so rapidly in the last 12 months as consumers switch at an ever increasing pace to digital services.” He estimated industry DVD demand in the U.K. fell 30 percent in the holiday selling season from the same 2017 period. HMV sold 31 percent of all physical music in the U.K. in 2018 and 23 percent of all DVDs and Blu-rays, “with its market share growing month by month throughout the year,” said Hilco. "Industry consensus" is that physical media sales will fall by another 17 percent in the U.K. during 2019, it said. As a result, the HMV board “concluded that it will not be possible to continue to trade the business,” it said.
Chinese social media and tech company Tencent incorporated DTS Stereo Plus in its Dingdang smart display speaker, said the audio company Thursday. DTS Stereo Plus post-processing audio is said to boost sound quality from stereo speakers located inside a single enclosure. The speaker begins shipping in China Monday.
A Beautiful Planet, narrated by Jennifer Lawrence, and Journey to the South Pacific, narrated by Cate Blanchett, are the first titles to be released under Imax Enhanced, said DTS Tuesday. The documentaries, on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Disc at a $34.98 list price, were $19.99 and $20.03 Tuesday at Amazon. A Beautiful Planet was shown as available; Journey to the South Pacific was temporarily out of stock.
Arcam announced a line of Imax-Enhanced AV receivers due this quarter. It didn’t give pricing for the four receivers certified to play back Imax remastered 4K HDR content with DTS:X audio. DTS and Imax announced plans for the certification and licensing program in September (see 1809040055) and told us in New York last month (see 1811140042) roughly 30 titles with Imax Enhanced digitally remastered 4K HDR content will begin rolling out from studio launch partners Sony Pictures and Paramount in January. Content will be available on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray discs and via 4K streaming services. DTS had to convert Imax cinema sound to a format for DTS:X home systems, John McDaniel, vice president-business development, ecosystems, at DTS parent Xperi, told us. DTS mapped the Imax speaker configuration to the home environment so content could play back on 5.1, 7.1 or 11.4-channel speaker setups. Imax has a center-screen height channel for science and documentary titles, and studios began leveraging that channel for immersive mixes, he said. DTS mixers inserted that speaker "into our algorithm as a persistent center-screen height object that can be rendered into any consumer environment,” he said, since the height speakers in an Imax theater are discrete, not object based. “We are leveraging the object-based codec to place a virtual speaker that is rendered into the consumer’s environment,” he said. The sound is converted into an immersive mix with low-frequency effects on the post-production side, and it’s completed on the Imax Enhanced audio products, McDaniel said. The result is a mix compatible with standard DTS:X AVRs. Playing the Imax Enhanced mix through Enhanced-certified components “will complete the conversion process” on bass management and other components to take the experience up another level, he said.
Pioneer bowed a high-end Ultra HD Blu-ray player with a low-resonance chassis design said to be optimized for the 5,000 rpm rotational speeds of the UHD Blu-ray format. The $1,099 UDP-LX500, a universal disc player, has two HDMI outputs, two-way RS-232 ports and IP control, allowing for enhanced driver options with control systems from Control4 and Crestron, said the company Tuesday. The player's main board was configured to achieve a high signal-to-noise ratio during video and audio processing by adopting a six-layer interstitial via hole construction technique, enabling the company to optimize the routing of digital signal wiring to minimize ground impedance, it said. The UDP-LX500 supports three HDMI output modes: "Separate," which enables high-quality transmission by separating video and audio via the main/sub HDMI outputs; "Single," which routes both video and audio output via the main HDMI output; and "Pure Audio," which delivers an audio-only output from the sub HDMI terminal, Pioneer said.