For Conn’s, “the most disappointing sales trend” in recent weeks has come in the TV category, CEO Theo Wright said Tuesday on an earnings call. Though TV sales trends have been “consistently good” during heavy promotional periods like Black Friday and the buildups to the Super Bowl and March Madness, “outside of these periods television sales trends have not been as strong,” he said. Conn’s estimates 49 percent of its TV sales in February involved an Ultra HD set, Wright said. “When customers have a need or a desire for a new television, the value of the product is compelling, but we’ve not been able to generate sustained traffic for the category,” he said. “Thus far, we’re not seeing the hope for a replacement cycle.” It was a markedly gloomier outlook than Wright gave immediately after Black Friday weekend when he declared Ultra HD “the big winner for us so far in the holiday period," so much so that “we could see a meaningful replacement cycle" forming as a result (see 1412100047).

Cinema theater chain Vue International has equipped all of its 83 screens in the U.K. and Ireland with Sony Digital Cinema 4K systems and will now use them to screen plays from London’s National Theatre, shot live and post-produced in 4K, said representatives of Vue, the National Theatre and Sony U.K. at a press preview screening and briefing in London Tuesday. After 4K tests with the stage production of War Horse in February 2014, the first end-to-end 4K production, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, starts playing in Vue theaters across the U.K. this month, the representatives said. The play, by David Hare and based on Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo’s book on slum life in Mumbai, India, was captured in performance March 12 with six Sony F55 cameras, they said. “Event cinema,” as Vue calls the genre of projecting theater and sports onto the big screen, is now Vue’s fastest-growing business, Kevin Styles, Vue managing director-U.K. and Ireland, said at the briefing. Rufus Norris, the National Theatre’s artistic director, said screened theater had doubled the National Theatre’s audiences since it began the first 2K productions in 2009. Sony representatives said the color space captured with the Sony F55s is far in excess of the BT.709 standard for HDTV. The material is mastered in Ultra HD (3840 x 2160) and a 4K digital cinema package created for cinema projection (4096 x 2160) has the addition of horizontal blanking, Sony said. At the screening, we were impressed with the 4K image clarity, and found the experience rewarding and enjoyable, but, of course, very different from attending performances at the National Theatre in person. The use of close-ups and focus-pulling between characters is quite unlike live theater, especially as 4K resolution heightens the defocusing effect, we found.

LG’s 2014 40UB8000 40-Inch 4K Ultra HD LED TV was Amazon’s Deal of the Day Wednesday at a 58 percent discount. The 60 Hz smart TV was on sale for $499, down from a list price of $1,199. Elsewhere, the 40UB8000 was selling for $699 at Abt Electronics and Adorama, for $689 at B&H Photo, and for full price at Best Buy, we found.

Séura expanded its outdoor and mirror TV lines Thursday with a rollout at the Luxury Technology Show in New York. The new outdoor TV models, dubbed Storm and Storm Ultra Bright, boast an IP56 weatherproof rating to withstand dust, rain and snow. The TVs are designed for all-season operation with a rated climate range of minus 30 degrees to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, the company said. The Storm Ultra Bright is designed for placement in direct sunlight, and the Storm is made for use in nondirect sunlight, the company said. The Ultra Bright, an HDTV model with a 700-nit rating, is available in 42-, 47- and 55-inch screen sizes and ranges in price from $4,999 to $7,499, according to the company website. The Storm, a 4K Ultra HD TV, measures 2.7-inch thick, includes a seamless anti-glare glass face and has a brightness rating of 450 nits, the company said. Pricing wasn’t available for the Storm, which is available in 42-, 55- and 65-inch screen sizes. Séura also launched its next-gen Vanishing Entertainment TV Mirrors, which act as framed mirrors when the TV is powered off. The latest TV mirror is a 4K Ultra HD model with top-mounted connections for simpler installation, the company said.

LG used the Digital Signage Expo 2015 this week in Las Vegas to bow its “next generation” of digital signage products, including a 98-inch-class 16:9 Ultra HD display with a bezel width of only 0.57 inch that can be mounted in portrait or landscape mode “for use in a wide range of commercial applications,” the company said Thursday. LG also bowed at least two full HD digital signage products featuring a commercial version of the webOS operating system it builds into its consumer smart TVs, the company said. A “simple network management protocol” feature on the products with webOS lets a display “automatically configure a self-diagnosis to check the screen status with a pixel sensor,” LG said. “These features were designed to shorten integration time, reduce maintenance of the displays and allow business owners to focus on what is important for them, their customers.”

Broadcom’s BCM7252 system-on-a-chip (SoC) is “powering” the world’s first Ultra HD set-top box for Android TV, the chip maker said Wednesday. The SoC is embedded in the Freebox set-top offered by Free, the French Internet TV provider, Broadcom said. The BCM7252 delivers the performance and security levels required for Android TV certification and also is the first device to support HEVC-encoded, 10-bit 4K content at 60 frames a second, it said. The BCM7252 is in production and the Freebox is being shipped to subscribers starting this month, Broadcom said.

Vizio said Tuesday it’s collaborating with Everdream on an original documentary shot in 4K that will premiere at South by Southwest 2015 in Austin this week. The collaboration on Growth is part of an effort to create original cinematic 4K content to support its P-Series of Ultra HD TVs, Vizio said in a news release. The 14-minute Growth tells the story of 75 individuals as they journey through various chapters in life, Vizio said. The company didn’t immediately respond to questions about retail demo plans for the content.

The Digital TV Group’s UHD Forum in the U.K. is “providing advice to retailers to ensure that they can provide consumers with accurate information” on 4K TV, “satisfying the early adopters who will be the bedrock of future market growth," CEO Richard Lindsay-Davies said Thursday. His statement followed a reprimand the U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority gave online retailer DSG Retail not to re-run ads it ran during the holiday selling season overexaggerating the benefits of 4K, he said. The authority directed DSG in future ads to clearly communicate “the standard of quality that would be achieved” on a 4K TV and not to claim, without supporting evidence, that the image quality would show greater detail not viewable on a 1080p TV, he said. “Ultra HD represents an enormous opportunity for the TV industry to take the viewing experience to a level even greater than the leap from standard-def to HD, but exaggerating the offering at an early stage could damage consumer confidence before the true benefits come to fruition.” DSG representatives didn’t comment.

Large-screen TVs and mobile phones were the “primary drivers” of Best Buy’s year-over-year revenue growth, “and more than offset weakness in the tablet category,” CEO Hubert Joly said Tuesday on an earnings call. Best Buy’s priorities for the year ahead are to “capitalize on the ultra-high definition TV cycle,” and opening 20 more Magnolia Design Center stores-within-a-store to end the year with 78, he said. Best Buy also wants to grow its connected home and health and wearable businesses “to an optimized assortment and improved multi-channel customer experience,” he said. It also plans to “increase our branded exclusive and private label assortment,” and expand “our secondary market growth strategy to offer consumers better access to these types of products and improve our margin recovery on returns,” he said.

Nearly half of U.S. homes will own a 4K TV by 2020, and U.S. penetration will reach 10 percent in 2016, from just 1 percent in 2014, Strategy Analytics said Monday in a global market forecast report. The report sees the U.S. emerging as the leading market for 4K TVs by 2020 in terms of household penetration, followed by the leading Western European markets, Australia, South Korea and China. Demand for 4K TVs is soaring worldwide “as entry level price points drop well below $1,000, model availability expands and consumers seek out the next best technology as they upgrade their aging flat panel TVs,” said the research firm. Other 4K TV findings: (1) Global shipments grew 633 percent in 2014 from a year earlier to reach 12.1 million units, with Asia Pacific accounting for 75 percent, followed by North America (12 percent) and Western Europe (11 percent). (2) Global shipments will more than double in 2015 to 27.5 million units and by 2018, annual shipments will nearly quadruple to 100 million. (3) Six of every 10 4K TV sets shipped globally in 2014 were 50 inches or larger, and a quarter of all 50-inch and larger TVs that shipped were 4K models. (4) Sub-50-inch 4K TVs will become more widely available in 2015 and the category will be the majority of 4K TV shipments globally by the end of 2016. (5) Wide color gamut and high dynamic range “support” will be built into “premium” 4K TV models this year, “creating a more discernable price tier structure in the market.” Ultra HD “will become the standard resolution for virtually all large-screen TVs within 3-4 years' time and we will see it penetrate further into smaller screen sizes as manufacturing efficiencies improve,” said David Watkins, Strategy Analytics service director-connected home devices. “As we saw with the transition from SD to HD, it is the TV manufacturers who are leading the Ultra HD charge although significant steps are being made on the delivery infrastructure and content production parts of the value chain. As the inevitable price competition eats into the ability of the TV vendors to make any meaningful profit from selling Ultra HD TVs, many brands are adding support for wider color gamuts and high dynamic range in order to differentiate their models and charge a premium over ‘standard' Ultra HD models."