Rebecca Day

With Aereo’s fate resting on a Supreme Court ruling looming soon on the copyright infringement lawsuit brought by ABC (CED April 21 p1), the over-the-air streaming TV provider is continuing to offer subscriptions for its TV/DVR service. We signed up for a one-month trial, currently available in 11 markets, to get a feel for the potential cord-cutter service that many agree could change the broadcast TV model significantly if Aereo prevails in the case.

Established home automation companies are looking to secure footholds in the rapidly evolving connected home market, which they said received weighty affirmation last week when Apple announced its HomeKit framework to connect smart devices in the home. “It’s great news for everybody in the industry,” Jim Carroll, president of Savant Systems, told Consumer Electronics Daily.

Gill Industries said it will bow its first commercially available “wireless-through-surface” charging transmitter at the NeoCon design expo for commercial interiors, which opens Monday in Chicago. Gill’s TesLink transmitter supports the Alliance for Wireless Power’s (A4WP) Rezence standard and incorporates WiPower wireless charging technology that A4WP founding member Qualcomm is licensing to CE accessories manufacturers, automotive suppliers and furniture makers for wireless charging applications. The new product comes as Intel is developing a Rezence chipset and a competing consortium is eyeing a solution for low-power wireless resonance charging.

TCL on Friday took the wraps off an 85-inch Ultra HD TV at the TCL-owned Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. TCL, known for uber-competitive pricing, didn’t give pricing on its 85UH9500 smart TV, but a company spokesman said TCL bowed the industry’s first sub-$1,000 UHD TV last year. Pricing for the 85UH9500, along with TCL’s full 2014 UHD TV lineup, is due later this month, he said. The 85-incher will be showing HD matches of the World Cup, which begins this week, next door in the TCL Chinese Theatre Six, the spokesman said. The company won’t say until the full launch whether the matches will be upconverted to 4K or which upscaling technology its UHD TVs will use, he said. On TCL’s plans for Dolby Vision, Chris Martin, vice president-sales and marketing, told us TCL is still studying the idea for the U.S. market but isn’t prepared to “present anything yet.” Dolby Vision “is a high-end feature and would only be used in 4K sets from TCL,” rather than supplied to TCL’s OEM customers, he said. The 85UH9500 is HDMI 2.0-compliant and has HEVC support, the spokesman said. The TV announcement coincided with the unveiling of TCL Chinese Theatre’s 25-foot LED marquees, with pixel density of 15,625 pixels per square meter and a brightness level of 8,000 nits that automatically adjusts to the time of day to save energy. TCL is bringing out an 85-inch UHD TV at a time when competitors have been trying to shed their inventories of mammoth TVs. In early June (CED June 2 p6), Amazon was offering up to $500 in rewards to consumers who bought one of some three dozen premium TV models including 84- and 85-inch first-generation UHD models from Sony and LG. NPD doesn’t break out sales for screen sizes at the upper end of the spectrum, said Stephen Baker, vice president-industry analysis, but said: “Historically sales volumes fall off pretty dramatically at 65 inches and beyond.” Size and price “share the responsibility for sales challenges in that range but I would, in general, be more inclined to blame size,” he said, since “size of the product naturally limits how many people will put it into their house.” Baker doesn’t think “that if it was substantially cheaper you would have commensurate rise in the sales volumes,” he said. That would strike many as bad news for a beleaguered TV industry that has pegged its growth hopes on the less-competitive 65-inch and-larger category.

In concurrent news releases Thursday, Barnes & Noble said that a co-branded tablet deal with Samsung has allowed it to secure the third-party manufacturer partnership it has been seeking for color tablets (CED June 26/13 p4), and it has also completed a lease agreement with Google for Nook Media’s leased office space in Palo Alto that will slash its footprint from 208,000 square feet to 88,000 square feet.

The Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP) announced at Computex 2014 in Taipei Wednesday that its Rezence technology is the first wireless charging standard to deliver a specification for multi-device charging up to 50 watts. That expands the wireless charging capability beyond smartphones to include tablets, laptops and other consumer electronics, a direction the group of wireless charging companies outlined at the International Wireless Power Summit late last year (CED Dec 9 p1).

HiFi House, the three-store mid-Atlantic AV specialty chain, abruptly closed its doors Wednesday after 59 years. An outgoing phone message at the store’s Broomall, Pennsylvania, location said the company had “ceased operations.” Questions emailed to the chain weren’t immediately answered. Bob Hana, managing director of the Home Technology Specialists of America (HTSA), told us in an email, “Unfortunately this morning we've heard the news that HiFi House was forced to close their doors.” While sales had been “steadily increasing” at the HTSA member retail chain, “their bank had grown impatient with their situation and has forced them to begin liquidation proceedings immediately,” Hana said. On the move’s reflection of the specialty AV market, Hana said the closing was “just another one of the unfortunate stories that has occurred a few too many times over the past five years.” He said HTSA’s hope is that other local HTSA members “will engage where possible” to assist HiFi House custom installation clients “where this makes sense.” HiFi House CEO Jon Robbins, a founding member of HTSA, has been “a key, instrumental contributor to HTSA and our industry for many, many years,” Hana said. HiFi House had been in business since 1955, and Robbins joined the company in 1976. Richard Glikes, former head of HTSA, said the shuttering of HiFi House is another example of the Internet’s impact on consumer electronics specialty retailing. “The Internet arc has come to a point where people don’t want to leave their house to shop, and they're willing to buy from pictures,” he said. “Unless a store is an event or a Disneyland of sorts, people are not going to come out,” he said. “You have to be mean and lean and tough to make it in retail,” he said.

Technology provided a solution for the long-awaited resolution of the decade-old breach of license suit brought by the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) against Kaleidescape (CED Dec. 9/04). Kaleidescape will be able to continue selling its DVD-based movie servers that import Content Scramble System (CSS) DVDs through Nov. 29. Kaleidescape had been enjoined from selling the DVD servers by a court order that was under appeal (CED March 13/12 p1). By November, Kaleidescape said, it expects to have most DVD movies available for download from the Kaleidescape Store in the U.S., giving its customers a legal option for importing movies not on Blu-rays into their Kaleidescape systems.

Following Bose, NAD, Samsung and Sonos, Denon has entered the wireless multiroom audio market after what it called an eight-year development process. The heart of the Denon system is the HEOS platform that’s built around Wave’s MaxxAudio suite of audio enhancement tools. Brendon Stead, Denon vice president-product development, called HEOS an “extremely large project” for Denon that’s “very significant for the future of our business."

Sol Republic CEO Kevin Lee, who was instrumental in the initial discussions that led to the headphone manufacturing relationship between Beats Electronics and Monster, is banking on a continued distribution relationship with Apple stores after Apple’s $3 billion purchase of Beats. But Lee, whose company manufactures speakers and headphones, has heard nothing from Apple about how its headphone mix might change now that it owns the Beats brand, he told Consumer Electronics Daily.