Sigma Designs Thinks ‘Nearly All’ Its 4K SoCs Will Be ‘HDR-Enabled’ Next Year

Quarterly revenue doubled in the smart TV segment at Sigma Designs, CEO Thinh Tran said on a Tuesday earnings call. For Sigma, which was the first system-on-a-chip (SoC) supplier to “natively” support Dolby Vision high dynamic range (HDR) in 2014 (see 1409040067), the smart TV business “is continuing to show strength as our ecosystem of partners continue[s] to expand,” Tran said. In response, “we are designing to twice the number of TV models for next year that our smart TV SoC will ship into,” he said. But Sigma also has lingering doubts that 4K content delivery will develop quickly into a meaningful business, Chief Financial Officer Elias Nader said in Q&A. The “deployment infrastructure required for 4K is still going through its infancy,” Nader said. There “certainly” are “plenty of TV sets at dramatically lower prices for 4K, and certainly there is a wide array of 4K set-top boxes prepared to deploy and being deployed at this point in time,” he said. But “really the holdup comes back to” content providers, and their inability “to not only encode 4K content efficiently, but also then to distribute it on their networks,” he said. “And frankly I think the latter is the part that will take a little bit of time. So I would say it’s probably not going to be this coming year that we see any major rollouts, so maybe the end of next year, in 4K content.” Nevertheless, in TVs, as Sigma moves into 2016, it sees 4K growing to account for 60 percent of its SoC business, Nader said. Moreover, “nearly all” the 4K SoCs Sigma sells will be "HDR-enabled, I think, for next year,” he said.