Rebecca Day

LAS VEGAS -- Bang & Olufsen’s commitment to the WiSA (Wireless Speaker and Audio) standard and its product launch last fall could well be the long-awaited catalyst WiSA proponents have been waiting for to propel the wireless audio technology into the broader CE marketplace. The organization has more than doubled the number of member companies since last CES, Dylan Vance, chief technologist of WiSA, told Consumer Electronics Daily at CES. Last year at CES, there were 10 WiSA members and coming into CES it had 23. “I believe that when we leave CES we'll have 27,” Vance said.

LAS VEGAS -- Roku’s partnerships with TCL and Hisense, announced at CES this week, to incorporate its Roku TV reference path into co-branded smart TVs is “just one path for us,” Tom McFarland, Roku’s director of OEM business development, told Consumer Electronics Daily. The company still has its sights on the “millions” of TVs in households that will use the company’s set-top streaming players, including set-top boxes and Streaming Stick devices.

Nortek’s Core Brands demonstrated at CES extended uses of its SKAA-based wireless music technology to show that its recently launched Korus powered speaker system is “more than a music experience,” Rob Halligan, vice president of group strategy and marketing, told Consumer Electronics Daily. Korus began shipping in Q4 to accounts including Best Buy’s Magnolia Home Theater stores, Crutchfield and Amazon, and it wants now to show that the system’s 40-millisecond latency makes it suited for gaming and video applications, Halligan said. Nortek is hoping to fit Korus in the space between single-speaker audio solutions and a whole-home system, Halligan said, calling it the “85 percent of the market that won’t buy a 32-zone audio system.” With a 60-foot range through walls, the SKAA-based system fits a niche that fits homes with small zones and no Wi-Fi network, offering network independence and multiple media uses, Halligan said. He identified cable cord-cutters as potential customers who want good sound through streaming video services. The Korus V600 packs five speakers in front for vocals and two side-firing speakers that “position instruments around you,” he said. The system doesn’t include Dolby or DTS decoding, but Halligan cited the company’s relationship with DTS that it announced at CEDIA, where Nortek said it would “look at DTS as one of the solutions we would support for multi-room solution.” No product announcement is being made now, but Halligan indicated a product from that partnership would reach the market this year. Halligan said Nortek was pleased with Q4 sales given that “we were late” to the market for the holiday sales season. Now the company is hoping to broaden the reach of the system by “showing examples of where Korus can go.” At CES, Nortek is showing Korus’s “capabilities” rather than new products and said a product announcement for a portable Bluetooth-enabled product will come in “in short order.” An expansion of Korus for the TV is also a “natural extension” given the company’s entrenched position in the in-wall speaker market, he said. Nortek will leverage other protocols as necessary to develop products based on use cases, Halligan said. He alluded to an “ultraportable Bluetooth speaker” in the works that would use Bluetooth at the beach and the SKAA wireless protocol at home with a tablet. Nortek launched Korus based on SKAA, but “other protocols are not out of the question at all,” he said. The company is taking an agnostic approach and doesn’t want to build a “walled garden,” he said. Korus is using sound quality as its differentiator, and Halligan compared the current Bluetooth speaker market to the headphone market where “lower-priced product collapsed” leaving consumers looking for a higher quality solution that Korus hopes to fill.

LAS VEGAS -- Samsung crowed about having become the No. 1 TV maker for TVs 60 inches and larger at its CES press conference Monday, a position once owned by Sharp, which dominated the jumbo home TV market for three years. But Sharp itself took a different turn at its CES press conference, with CEO Toshi Osawa giving its B2B business top billing in opening remarks before moving on to the company’s 2014 line of consumer TVs.

LAS VEGAS -- DTS is at CES this week hoping to build its partner base for two platforms already in the works: the “Headphone:X” platform that it first showed at CES last year and its Play-Fi multiroom audio product that launched with niche audio provider Wren Sound and with Phorus, developer of the technology, which DTS bought in 2012.

LAS VEGAS -- Samsung is making a bold design statement for curved TV at CES, with three of its 10 new Ultra HD TVs for 2014 configured as curved models in 65-, 78- and 105-inch screen sizes, and three more Full HD curved LED models at 48, 55 and 65 inches. Curved TV provides a more immersive experience, said Joe Stinziano, executive vice president of Samsung Electronics of America told a CES news conference Monday. Curved designs make a TV “seem bigger than it is,” Stinziano said, while delivering a contrast ratio double that of flat-screen TV.

Chevrolet shed a little more light on its connected car strategy at a pre-CES event Sunday, saying its OnStar 4G LTE mobile hotspot, powered by AT&T Wireless, will enable seven devices in a vehicle to connect simultaneously via Wi-Fi. The technology is due to launch in 2015-model vehicles in August, said Alan Batey, global Chevrolet brand chief at General Motors. Batey said Chevrolet was the first to offer car radio in 1924, a $2,000 option in today’s dollars, and that it was fitting for Chevrolet to be at CES to unveil “the car of the future.” The company wants the connected car concept to span a broad sampling of vehicles, starting this year with its entry-level Spark vehicle and going up to the sporty Corvette, with some eight vehicles in between. The wide range is “indicative of our broad commitment to deliver more value and convenience through smart technology applications,” Batey said. Other vehicles offering OnStar 4G LTE at launch include the Impala, Malibu and Volt, followed by the Equinox, Silverado, Silverado HD, Spark and Spark EV later in the year. The majority of the 2015 Chevrolet lineup in the U.S and Canada will have a 4G LTE connection built-in at vehicle launch, Chevrolet said. AT&T didn’t provide pricing for the vehicle data plans but said current AT&T customers will be able to add a plan to a “bucket of data” through the Mobile Share plans AT&T offers for tablet users. Drivers will also be able to get a stand-alone option of 4G LTE, the companies said. Chevrolet also said its AppShop will be available this summer on select 2015 models in the U.S. and Canada with MyLink technology. Owners will be able to view available apps and download them directly to the vehicle and then organize, update and delete them. Apps will connect drivers to music, news, weather, travel information, vehicle data and more, Batey said. Apps mentioned at the press event included iHeartRadio, TuneIn, Famigo, The Weather Channel and Priceline. Regarding potential driver distraction caused by a hotspot that enables occupants of a vehicle to connect a smartphone, tablet or laptop to the Internet, Batey turned the question around and asked what was preventing drivers from connecting devices today. A spokeswoman for GM said it takes a “very strong position making sure that whatever we integrate in our vehicles is done with the safety of the driver in mind.” She said without elaborating that the company’s technical team has specific criteria that an app must meet for its driver distraction requirements.

LAS VEGAS -- In stark contrast to glitzy consumer TV marketing extravaganzas of the past at CES, Panasonic used the first part of its allotted 45 minutes of press conference time to trumpet its display prowess for categories other than CE.

Short TV supplies constrained some dealers during the holiday selling season, but audio was strong across the board, Consumer Electronics Daily found in a poll of retailers in the week after Christmas. Most dealers reported a general uptick in consumer confidence that was borne out through spending on CE during the holiday season, although at least one dealer reported possible shopper fatigue setting in post-Christmas in what has traditionally been one of specialty AV dealers’ most profitable weeks of the year.

Samsung is headed into 2014 with a multi-pronged strategy for home audio based on multiroom audio, TV sound, Bluetooth speakers and home theater, said Jim Kiczek, director-digital audio and video, on a pre-CES audio briefing webcast. The company plans to exploit market opportunities in soundbars and wireless audio, as consumers trend toward soundbars and away from 5.1 and 7.1 home-theater-in-a-box systems and to Bluetooth speakers at the expense of docking systems, Kiczek said.