Red Mere Spreading Word On Smart, Thin HDMI Cables

Portable devices with HDMI outputs are creating a market for thinner, more flexible HDMI cables. That’s the message technology company Red Mere is pushing with its “smart” active technology used in products from Monster, Vizio, RadioShack, PNY and Samsung. On a press swing through New York Tuesday, Red Mere founder Peter Smyth said the company hopes to create awareness among consumers that they can unleash audio and video from their portable devices for playback on TV in a very manageable way. Smyth told us the company has a single-cable solution in the works for “mirroring” the iPad 2 and iPhone 4 displays on an HDTV, without the need for the $39 dongle Apple sells today to connect its device to a standard HDMI cable. Smyth wouldn’t name marketing partners for the device, but said it will be in stores this summer.

Smyth demoed a 10-meter cable with one-tenth the thickness of a standard HDMI cable running from an iPad 2, with a dongle, to a TV over HDMI. By “taking out the copper and the plastic” and putting video booster technology into a silicon chip at each end of the cable, Red Mere was able to produce a flexible cable that consumers can easily take with them. The chips get power, less than 500 milliwatts, from the display, Smyth said. The previous generation chips sapped power from source and display but “we realized we couldn’t create a power drain on a portable device,” Smyth said, so the company redesigned the chip to be display-powered only. The technology meets HDMI standards, Smyth said.

Smyth said the thin HDMI cable is sorely needed in a market where only 2 percent of HDMI-equipped digital cameras are actually connected to a TV using HDMI, which he attributes to the bulkiness of HDMI cables. He boldly predicts a near future when 30 percent of HDMI cables will be “smart,” enabling consumers to mirror what they're viewing on HDMI-equipped camcorders, cellphones, iPads and more on a TV. The technology can be extended to “lots of different cables,” he said, including USB.

Seventy percent of chips with Red Mere technology are produced in Taiwan, Smyth said. Although some of the company’s bulk cable suppliers were affected by the earthquake in Japan, there’s enough supply in inventory to ensure a steady supply of cable, he said.

While there’s currently a premium associated with the technology on the sales floor, Smyth expects that to dissipate as cost-savings roll in from reduced copper costs and lower shipping rates due to lighter weight cables. If all HDMI cables went the way of Red Mere, that could save a quarter million tons of copper “that wouldn’t have to be mined or smelted,” Smyth claimed.

For consumers, Smyth said the smart HDMI cable can open up a new world of portable computing. “People can easily do presentations from their cell phone,” he said. With a smartphone and a cable, “you have access to the cloud and can turn a TV into a Web-enabled device,” he said.