LED-Backlit TVs Spurring CE Makers to Enter LED Bulb Market

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.

Since Vizio has a “great relationship” with the chip manufacturers, along with buying power, Lowe said he figured, “Why don’t we bring this to the lighting market, and let’s drive that cost down.” Lowe showed a light array using the 8.5-watt LED bulbs claiming illumination equivalent to a 40-watt incandescent bulb. The lights are dimmable and will be in stores in Q3, he said. Vizio will also sell 60- and 75-watt equivalents, he said.

Consumers “want to be good,” Lowe said, but at $30-$40 for a bulb, “it costs a fortune” to outfit a kitchen with LED bulbs, “and that’s just not right.” Costs are “prohibitive,” even though lifecycles are much longer than incandescents, he said. “You buy a bulb when your child is born and when they graduate high school you buy the next bulb, so it does last a long time,” but it’s “far too much of a step” from a regular bulb to an LED, he said. “We must bring that price down so that people will begin to adopt it."

Lowe wouldn’t say what the price of the bulbs will be, but as far as giving competitors something to worry about, “it’s looking good,” he said. “We're hoping to take that market by storm.” He compared the nascent LED lamp market to the early days of HDTV when Vizio entered in 2003. “It was a lot of traditional brands and traditional margins,” he said. “We went in and lowered the margins and cut the costs. Now it’s time somebody came into the traditional lighting market and shook it up a bit."

Vizio isn’t likely to stop at bulbs, Lowe said. The company is “toying with the idea” of control lighting with an Android-based tablet the company plans to release later in the year. “Since it will be Android-based, I'm sure someone will write an application for it,” he said. Lowe told Consumer Electronics Daily he envisioned a map of consumers’ living rooms on the tablet “where you start pointing at light bulbs” for control, reminiscent of Savant’s pricey Apple-based control platform. Lowe conceded the ideas “were all in my head” and that “nobody in the company agrees with me yet,” but he thinks “it’s a great idea and we'll pursue that further.” He extended the concept to lighting control via TV, something Google is also doing with Google TV.

Vizio will go to existing distribution partners to sell lighting, but is likely to open it beyond traditional CE retail channels “where it makes sense to do so,” Lowe said. That could be Lowe’s, Home Depot or supermarkets, he said. The company will start off with its traditional partners in retail “who have had faith in us, and hopefully they'll have faith in us again,” he said.

Lowe hopes low-priced lamps will be the incentive consumers need to care enough about energy savings to take conscious action to make a purchase. That’s a challenge for the industry overall, panelists agreed, whether it’s switching to high-efficiency lighting or recycling electronics. Peter Fannon, Panasonic vice president of corporate and government affairs, said any effort toward green electronics use should be “the underlying norm” and not something that should require extra effort or cost on consumers’ part. Performance and practical choices for “features you need” should be paramount, he said.

"Green” as a feature ranks third for consumers in buying considerations, said Martin LaMonica, editor of CNET’s GreenTech section. Although showing power usage “is a useful tool,” most people care more about performance and price, he said. If a product has environmental benefits to boot, sometimes “that will tip the scale,” he said.

The electronics industry is one of the most “forward-looking industries” in terms of sustainability, said Michael Kanellos, editor of Greentech Media, citing advances in more efficient displays, flash memory and battery power. He described an electric car as a “notebook on wheels,” and growth in that industry will drive demand for more lithium-ion batteries. “Even though there are a lot of lithium-ion batteries now, it’s nothing compared with what it will be in 10 years,” he said.

Despite the advances, there’s a lot of work that has to be done regarding sustainability in the CE industry, Kanellos said. “Good luck finding a lot of phones with bio-plastic backing,” he said. Recycling “needs a lot of improvement,” he said, noting a recent UN study finding that only 1 percent of lithium is recovered and recycled, despite widespread reports of lithium shortages. The industry also isn’t doing much in recycling of rare-earth metals “even though they've gone up 10x in price over the past couple of years,” Kanellos said.

TV makers trumpeted their progress in efficient flat-panel TVs. Rey Roque, vice president of marketing for Westinghouse Digital, noted the company just began shipping 40- and 42-inch LED-based LCD TVs and has taken steps in the supply chain “and logistics” to be more green. In its 46-inch TV line, “we can fit 20 percent more in a 40-foot container than we did three years ago with an equivalent product,” he said. Westinghouse’s all-in-one manufacturing program in which it buys “open cells” -- only the glass from the fabs -- and integrates back lights and plastics at one facility has saved back-and-forth transportation of goods and unnecessary packaging of individual components, he said. The carbon footprint of those TVs has been slashed between 22-25 percent, he said.

Vizio began looking at TVs’ energy consumption and impact on the environment four years ago, when the company began using vegetable-based inks in user manuals and recyclable, smaller cartons, which Lowe called a “small start.” More recently, the company has been concentrating on reducing power in its TVs. While Vizio shipped 20 percent more TVs in 2010, energy consumption remained flat on overall volume of TVs, he said. Average energy saved per TV was about 40 kilowatts, he said. “We could run the entire city of Las Vegas for 18 months on the power we saved from 2009 to 2010.” Fifty percent of Vizio TVs shipped today are LED-lit models, he said.

Plasma energy consumption has come down, too, Fannon said. Panasonic’s models range from 69 watts for a 42-inch model to 159 watts for a 65-inch plasma in high-efficiency mode, he said. The company’s LED-lit LCD TVs run from 28 and 32 watts up to 60 watts in larger sizes.

Roque of Westinghouse urged a more “streamlined regulatory environment.” Energy Star guidelines are straightforward for TVs, he said, but in lighting, to prove the life of an LED bulb for Energy Star in its Pixi line of LED lamps, “you need 6,000 hours,” he said. That’s nine months of testing, and by that time “you're on the next iteration of product,” he said. In turn, he said ratings are confusing to a consumer trying to translate incandescent watt ratings to LEDs.

LaMonica called on consumers to “step up a bit to get the ball rolling” on recycling and energy consumption. He said they don’t have a lot of guidance “if they want to do the right thing.” He cited Energy Star, “which doesn’t have a lot of standards,” and EPA’s EPEAT, which he called a “good rating system.” If consumers were to reward companies that went beyond the norm in green features, that would drive demand, he said. He also said consumers need to be more aware of what happens with electronics “when they're done with them,” but said recycling has to be “easy and convenient” for them to engage.

Manufacturers on the panel encouraged uniform regulation rather than differing state requirements for sustainability issues. Vizio’s Lowe said the company has been trying to reduce power consumption and the effect of TVs on the environment without waiting for regulations to be passed. A Vizio 2011 32-inch model uses less power than a 40-watt incandescent bulb and costs $8 a year in electricity to run, he said.

Regarding industry efforts at green programs, Panasonic’s Fannon referred to the Sustainability Consortium, a multi-industry group that hopes to come up with “common recognition of icons, labels and terminology.” That’s so that regardless of reseller, consumers can be confident that a product they buy has been “verified and ratified” by reliable sources, he said. The Sustainability Consortium “has a good shot because it has everybody in the same pool” trying to come up with the same terminology, Fannon said.