Toshiba Plans Full Retail Attack When It Launches Ultra HD Bundle in August

After scaling back its TV presence at retail over the past two years, Toshiba hopes to jumpstart its return with a trio of Ultra HD TVs, starting at $4,999, which will ship to its full retail channel in August, said Scott Ramirez, vice president-product marketing and development, at a CE Week press conference. To sweeten the pot for consumers and retailers, the company is tossing in an upscaling 4K Blu-ray player and a matching soundbar in a limited-time bundling deal that will run for the first couple of months following launch, Ramirez said. Consumers who buy one of the three 4K TVs will get the Blu-ray/media box and soundbar for free, he said. The minimum advertised price of the Blu-ray player is $299, he said. The company will decide after a couple of months whether the bundling promotion will continue, Ramirez said, and Toshiba will support the launch with a media campaign.

While some competitors are launching Ultra HD through the specialty AV channel, “Using the word specialty dealer sounds very limiting,” Ramirez said. “Anywhere where there’s a person on the floor who can explain the technology, then we want to be there,” he said. “You need a body there who can explain it, but we're not limiting it to a certain type of selling floor,” he said. That includes virtual bodies in the e-commerce channel, as the 4K products will also be available through online dealers, he said.

Toshiba will field three 4K TVs with resolution of 3840 x 2160 in its L9300 series, including a $4,999 58-inch model, a $6,999 65-inch model and an 84-inch model at $16,999, Ramirez said. In the future 4K “will be important in 50-inch,” he said, but the company is focusing on the larger screen sizes for the launch year. Toshiba sees the market for 4K TVs as “relatively small” in 2013 with only 75,000 units expected to sell industrywide. “The big change” in the market will come in 2014 when technology changes and prices come down, he said. He wouldn’t provide forecasts for percentage drops in 4K TV pricing but said, “They'll change fairly significantly next year.” He predicted “hockey-stick growth” for 4K in 2014.

Setting the stage for Ultra HD’s position in the market, Ramirez said 3D TV is down in every screen size this year, despite the 3D compatibility of L9300 series: “3D is not a driver” of TV sales. While connected TV is a driver of sales and will become more important, he said, it alone doesn’t drive TV sales. Ramirez said picture quality will be the driver of Ultra HD sales because it’s something consumers have “always been willing to pay for,” citing transitions from SD to HD TV and VHS to DVD. He showed historical data saying that within five years of the launch of DVD, more than half of video customers had shifted from VHS to DVD. The shift from SD to HD TV purchases occurred within four years, he said, and he cited similar statistics for transitions from 720p to 1080p and DVD to Blu-ray. In five years, he said, Ultra HD “can be more than 50 percent of the 50-inch-plus LED TV market.” Ultra HD “is not a fad,” but a “changing of the guard of what is television,” Ramirez said.

Toshiba is pitching its proprietary CEVO 4K Quad+Dual core processor as a differentiator from other 4K TVs. The SoC is Toshiba’s second-generation 4K chip and the company has said it won’t license it to other TV makers (CED Jan 9 p1). First-generation chips have been used in sets for the Japanese and European markets, giving Toshiba an edge on processing experience, he said. Processing capability will be key to 4K TVs because of the lack of native 4K content, he said. Consumers buying 4K TVs will primarily be watching upscaled HD “so the TV with the best upscaling is very, very important,” he said, “and not all upscalers are created equal.” Some 4K TVs “may look worse than a 1080p TV with 1080p content,” he said. The company is sourcing panels from several suppliers, he said, declining to name them.

On when native 4K content might be available, Ramirez said, he couldn’t “pre-announce someone else’s announcement,” but said he knew of “a couple of very important content providers” that will have 4K content in mid-2014 to help support the nascent market.

The BDX-6400 4K upscaling Blu-ray player Toshiba is bundling with its Ultra HD TVs is the first to be certified as a Technicolor 4K Blu-ray player, having passed specs for detail, edge, de-interlacing, noise reduction and video scaling, Ramirez said. Toshiba is billing the BDX-6400 as a “media box.” The player has an ePortal GUI, an open browser, Wi-Fi, MiraCast and remote server access so it can be upgraded over time, he said. The player’s Ultra Detail Enhancement (UDE) 4K upscaling engine has a two-stage enhancement feature, with a first stage that offers “superior 1080p,” including better edge definition, better detail and fewer artifacts than other models, he said. The second stage upscales the signal to 4K. When the Toshiba player sees the CEVO engine of a Toshiba 4K TV via HDMI, “it will only utilize stage one,” and the TV will handle upscaling, he said. When the BDX-6400 player is matched with another manufacturer’s 4K TV, it will use stages one and two and then upscale and output the signal in 4K, he said.

The bundled soundbar, designed as an aesthetic match to the TVs, is a 300-watt speaker system with Bluetooth and near field communication, Ramirez said. The soundbar will be included as part of a demo end cap display Toshiba will offer retailers to help sell the 4K experience, Ramirez said. Demo material will include native 4K content stored on Toshiba Qosmio PCs using SSDs for quick access, he said. Seven videos will run in a loop, and consumers can press a red button to see educational videos explaining 4K, he said. The demo content will include movies and sports clips, he said. Demo content will not include 1080p or 720p content so consumers won’t be able to see the upconversion performance of streaming or HD content, he said.