ON Semiconductor agreed to buy Quantenna for $24.50 per share in an all-cash transaction with an equity value of $1.07 billion and an enterprise value of $963 million. The acquisition adds Quantenna’s Wi-Fi and software capabilities to ON’s connectivity portfolio and strengthens its position in industrial and automotive markets, it said. The transaction, expected to close in second-half 2019, requires approval of Quantenna’s stockholders but not ON’s, it said.
Eurofins Digital Testing will showcase a new conformance test suite for ATSC 3.0 at NAB, it said Wednesday. Arreios for ATSC 3.0 enables certification and testing for UHD, HDR, video over broadcast and broadband, interactive applications, targeted advertising, emergency alerts, content recovery and watermarking, it said. The company will exhibit at Futures Park in North Hall booth N1335 in the Las Vegas Convention Center and in Westgate Director C, it said.
Four days before Version 1 Zigbee devices from Lowe’s doomed Iris smart home and security platform were set to go dark (see 1902010055), Hubitat announced local control and communication with Iris devices via its Elevation platform. Lowe’s said last month it was shutting down the cloud-based Iris platform Sunday in a planned exit of the Iris business announced last year. Hubitat engineers devised a way for Elevation to control Iris Version 1 devices locally, and the capability is included in a software update released Wednesday, the company said. Patrick Stuart, Hubitat vice president-product and business development, said Elevation is supporting Iris Zigbee sensors “on a platform that doesn't require the cloud or an internet connection to work.” Hubitat encouraged Iris owners with early Zigbee sensors that couldn’t be moved to other platforms to use the prepaid Visa cards Lowe’s offered them as compensation to buy the $99 Elevation hub on its website.
Huawei delivered on its promise to “rewrite the rules of photography,” blogged IHS analyst Wayne Lam Tuesday, highlighting “first-to-market” features for smartphones in the P30 series launched Tuesday in Paris. Huawei is the first vendor to incorporate a folded optics design that enables lossless optical zoom photography in a smartphone, said Lam. The 5x periscopic design allows for the lengthy optical column to be fitted along the length of the larger P30 Pro chassis by essentially folding the optical path 90 degrees. The design allows the periscopic zoom lens to work with the primary 40-megapixel (MP), wide and time-of-flight cameras to produce a 10x hybrid zoom, he said. Other notable features: an electro-magnetic induction speaker, high-ISO sensitivity, 40-megapixel image sensor that captures 40 percent more light, enhanced depth sensing, low-light videos, 40-watt fast charging to 70 percent in 30 minutes and 15-watt Qi wireless charging. Huawei ranked second among global smartphone manufacturers last year, shipping 206.1 million units vs. Apple’s 204.7 million units and Samsung’s 289.9 million units; it’s on track to ship 226.8 million phones this year, said IHS. The excitement about mobile photography innovations is “good news for the smartphone industry,” struggling to surpass “stagnant sales forecasts,” said Lam. Huawei and Samsung are investing heavily in mobile photography improvements, while Apple has “arguably been left behind in the current design cycle.” Other “radical” mobile photography designs are coming to market, including one from Nokia’s (HMD)/Light.co with a five-lens, selectable depth-of-focus camera. “Ultimately, competition breeds better products,” and the next wave to mobile photography, including time-of-flight and other “novel” optical sensors, “should give the industry confidence that smartphone innovations have longer legs than the naysayers have proclaimed,” said the analyst. As for Huawei's future in the U.S. market, Lam said the company's success in Europe "helps limit the immediate impact of pressures the company faces from the United States government." Short term, there doesn't appear to be a solution to the situation in the U.S., he said, and Huawei will continue to focus on its existing businesses.
NPD expects low single-digit percentage sales growth for U.S. consumer technology sales through 2021. Dollar sales growth is projected to slip to 2 percent this year, to a total $94 billion, vs. 3 percent growth from 2017 to 2018, it said. Wireless headphones and smart home devices will lead growth categories, adding $3 billion vs. 2018, the researcher forecast Tuesday. Wireless headphones are forecast to grow 52 percent in dollars this year, and smart entry products -- keyless entry and smart doorbells -- are expected to generate 55 percent growth. Core CE categories including PCs and TVs will continue to be the largest percentage of sales, said analyst Stephen Baker. TVs, PCs and related accessories will add $4.2 billion revenue in 2021 over 2018, led by larger screen and higher resolution TVs, gaming notebooks, and desktops and accessories, Baker said. Forty percent of consumers buying a replacement TV in the past two years were looking for a larger screen, he said, and the trend will continue: 75-inch and larger 4K TVs will have the largest revenue growth among screen sizes with sales topping $4 billion by 2021, said NPD.
Samsung’s partnership with Apple, integrating the iTunes app into 2018 and 2019 Samsung smart TVs, could give Samsung an edge, reported Strategy Analytics Monday. More than 20 percent of smart TVs sold worldwide last year were on Samsung’s Tizen platform, 12 percent on LG’s WebOS, 10 percent on Android TV and 4 percent were Roku-powered models. Some 157 million smart TVs were sold globally in 2018, or 67 percent of all TVs sold for the year, SA said. In North America, 25 percent of smart TVs sold last year were Roku-based. Despite thin hardware margins, the TV “remains a strategic priority” for technology companies due to the size of the installed base and the opportunity to sell advertising on smart TV interfaces and generate revenue from over-the-top content services, said analyst David Watkins. Smart TVs have transitioned from “clunky web browsers” to “sophisticated streaming platforms and intelligent content recommendation engines,” said analyst David Mercer. Apple said in its Monday announcement (see report, this issue) the Apple TV app will also be available on LG, Sony and Vizio TVs.
The IEEE Standards Association approved Panasonic’s broadband over powerline (BPL) communication technology for the IoT as the IEEE 1901a standard, said the company Monday. Panasonic proposed the technology, said to meet various demands for IoT-related services, in June, and it’s based on its HD-PLC Wavelet orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing technology. IEEE 1901a controls bands according to usage, allowing scalable communications with features to extend communications distances and to select speeds for the diverse communications needs of IoT-related services, said the company. The standard mode communication band can be doubled or quadrupled, allowing a theoretical 500 Mbps communication speed in double mode or a maximum of 1 Gbps in quadruple mode over coaxial cable or dedicated line, it said. The standard mode communication band can be compressed by a factor of two or four to concentrate energy in narrow bands, extending the communication distance up to twice the distance in standard mode with a lower communication speed, it said. The IoT BPL standard was designed for communications in homes but also supports large-scale networks covering social infrastructure such as buildings and factories, Panasonic said.
Amazon, streamed live from the Game Developers Conference Friday, showed viewers how to build an Alexa game skill. It boasted a voice-first riddle game created from “blank canvas” to fully planned in 7.5 hours. In the game, Alexa celebrates a right answer and corrects a wrong one, then tallies the number of correct answers at the end of the game, blogged Cami Williams, Alexa evangelist. The app isn’t all about voice: users can play against each other using Echo Buttons, tapping a button when they know the answer to a riddle, she said. In-skill purchasing allows players to buy packaged hints.
Apple’s expected foray into subscription VOD won’t dent Netflix or Amazon Prime Video growth, blogged Futuresource Friday. But the Apple SVOD service, the anticipated topic of the company’s Monday announcement, will be key in the evolution of the 2019 SVOD market this year, along with Disney, wrote analyst David Sidebottom, saying its 20 million Apple TV customers are a “ready-made” audience “waiting to switch on.” The service also will draw viewers via Apple’s partnership with Samsung, announced just before CES (see 1901070062), placing iTunes content on the TV maker’s 2018 and 2019 smart TVs. Sidebottom expects additional partnerships as Apple’s SVOD service ramps, including integration with pay TV. The company will need a “strong and wide content offering,” and even with exclusive or original content, SVOD subscribers will likely “be taking Apple as an additional service, rather than cannibalising their existing video subscriptions,” he wrote.
Softness in demand for DRAM and NAND components, partly from the slowdown in global smartphone shipments, prompted Micron Technology’s decision to scale back production to reduce “elevated” inventories, said CEO Sanjay Mehrotra on a Q2 call Wednesday. The excess inventory is “at good cost,” meaning there’s “no obsolescence issue,” he said. Next-generation “premium” smartphones introduced at Mobile World Congress “typically feature” 8 to 12 gigabytes of DRAM and 256 to 512 gigabytes of NAND, double the DRAM and quadruple the NAND of “current-generation” premium smartphones, he said. “These trends will likely cascade to lower-tier phones,” helping “re-ignite” smartphone unit sales beginning in 2020, he said. The smartphone market is spiraling toward its third straight year of declining shipments, reported IDC this month. Micron expects 5G to create a market opportunity “beyond mobile,” said Mehrotra. “We expect 5G adoption to create increased demand for memory and storage in IoT devices, wireless infrastructure and data centers.”