Rebecca Day

Pandora said it will lift its 40-hour-per-month listening cap on mobile devices on Sept. 1 due to growth in mobile advertising revenue. The company had imposed the listening limit in March on free accounts to help pay for surging royalty costs. CEO Joseph Kennedy said on the company’s earnings call Thursday that the cost of content “decreased dramatically” as a percentage of revenue, from 59 percent in Q2 last year to 51 percent this year. Pandora said it’s now the third-largest generator of mobile ad revenue behind Google and Facebook.

The LG 55EA9800 OLED TV, launched exclusively through Magnolia Design Centers within select Best Buy locations last month, is available for order “in any Best Buy store,” according to the BestBuy.com website. Due to “limited availability,” however, the $14,999 TV is on display only in the following Magnolia locations: West Los Angeles, Mission Viejo, San Francisco and Santana Row in California; Denver; Danbury, Conn.; Aventura, Fla.; Chicago; Novi, Mich.; Richfield, Minn.; Portsmouth, N.H.; New York City and Westbury in New York; Dallas, North Rim and The Woodlands in Texas; Springfield, Va.; and Bellevue, Wash. Although the Best Buy website also listed the $8,999 Samsung KN55S9CAFXZA OLED TV as a new product available in-store only, a quick scan of ZIP codes showed none of the Samsung models available at the roughly 20 New York City-area stores and none available in Best Buy stores in the Atlanta, St. Louis, Seattle, Chicago, Dallas or Los Angeles areas. It wasn’t clear which stores, if any, had the Samsung OLED TV on display. A Best Buy spokeswoman wasn’t able to tell us by our deadline how many Best Buy stores are showcasing the OLED, and she didn’t provide sales data for LG or Samsung OLED TVs citing company policy. Neither company responded by our deadline regarding early OLED TV sales data.

Digital marketing company Netsertive expanded its marketing technology platform to hike customer conversions from digital services. Under the new program, when potential customers enter a relevant keyword showing purchase intent, they're automatically directed to a dynamic lead page, Tim McLain, senior marketing manager, told us. Before the introduction of Netsertive’s Local Extend platform, AV integrators -- “if they were doing any Internet advertising at all” -- used search engine marketing through Google and Yahoo text ads that directed potential customers to a dealer locator at a manufacturer website or to the home page of the local integrator, McLain said. A “much better experience,” he said, is to send traffic to dynamic lead pages where consumers are invited to fill out a catalog or make a phone call for more information or a free consultation. With the dynamic lead approach “conversions are significantly higher” and the overall process is better for dealers and for manufacturers that want to increase their brand awareness, he said. In early testing, dealers that had been getting 10-20 qualified clicks a month through searches have doubled or tripled conversions using the Netsertive lead pages, he said. Manufacturers and dealers benefit from national campaigns that spread digital marketing funds “to the local level,” and in the process, Netsertive can provide them with data “down to a phone call or to a sales conversion,” McLain said. Netsertive also is moving into the next phase of its platform to code content so that landing pages render well on mobile devices as well as desktops and tablets. Most Netsertive manufacturer clients report that 30-40 percent of Internet searches come from mobile devices, and “responsive design” will ensure landing pages will look good regardless of the display device being used, he said.

Online U.S. consumers plan to spend more than $550 per person on CE devices this year, a 9 percent jump from 2012, said NPD Group’s 2013 “Household Penetration Study.” Nearly three in four consumers surveyed plan to buy a CE product over the next 12 months, NPD said. CE sales growth will be fueled by display devices, with 28 percent of consumers planning to buy a TV and 20 percent expecting to make a tablet purchase, NPD said.

Labor Day has come more than two weeks early at h.h. gregg, which launched a Labor Day sale Wednesday offering 30 percent discounts on electronics, appliances and furniture. As part of the company’s initiative to improve the integration between online and in-store shopping, email customers were encouraged to click a star on the weekly ad to save products to a list they could print and take to a store.

The four-year-old AVnu Alliance -- a forum promoting the adoption of IEEE 802.1-based AV bridging (AVB) specifications -- is hoping to leverage its budding presence in pro audio and automotive markets as it looks to bring interoperability for networked AV devices to CE products, Greg Schlechter, AVnu Alliance marketing work group chairman, told us. The alliance has begun establishing testing requirements for AVB standards for “reliable, time-synched AV streaming” over ethernet and Wi-Fi networks in residential applications, Schlechter said on a media tour in New York Wednesday.

Comments made on Barnes & Noble’s June earnings call suggesting the company was looking to explore options to offload its Nook color business were misinterpreted in the market, said Michael Huseby, Barnes & Noble president and CEO of Nook Media. Many people interpreted comments “incorrectly” and concluded “that we were getting out of the device business,” he said on the company’s fiscal 2014 Q1 earnings call Tuesday. “The company intends to continue to design and develop innovative Nook black-and-white and color devices,” he said. At least one new Nook device will be released in time for the holiday season and more are in the pipeline, Huseby said. He didn’t say whether the device would be color.

Version 3.0 of the MHL (Mobile High-Definition Link) specification, available for download early next month, is expected to ship in products beginning next year, Judy Chen, president of Silicon Image subsidiary MHL, told Consumer Electronics Daily. The next-gen spec, announced Monday, will double the bandwidth of the current interface, making it suitable for 4K resolution content with a wider color gamut, MHL said. A new feature is a high-speed data channel that will support file transfers between a laptop or external drive and a phone, Chen said. Current products with MHL connectivity are not upgradeable to MHL 3.0, she said. Other features include an improved Remote Control Protocol supporting touch screens, keyboards and mice; power charging up to 10 watts; backward compatibility with MHL 1 and 2 devices; compatibility with HDCP 2.2; and support of Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD, multiple displays and multiple connector types, MHL said. Users will be able to watch 4K content from a smartphone on a TV while using the TV’s remote control to control stop, rewind, fast forward and pause functions; enabling game play on a 4K display with no lag; turn a mobile device into a portable PC by adding peripherals including a mouse and keyboard; and interact with a car’s infotainment system through a smartphone while it’s charging, MHL said. MHL has an installed base of more than 330 million MHL 1- and 2-enabled products from more than 200 adopters, it said. The group plans to expand beyond the mobile-to-TV interface this fall to become “a relevant connectivity standard for audio/video receivers, Blu-ray Disc players, game consoles, and set-top boxes,” it said. Further details will be available later this year, it said.

When Samsung ships its supersized smartphone, the Mega ($149), through AT&T Wireless Friday, it will enter the limited air space occupied by the Huawei Ascend and the Sony Xperia Z Ultra, a category of over-6-inch smartphones, or phablets, that is encroaching in size on the most popular tablet segment. As consumers continue to use phones more for Internet-enabled activities such as social networking and watching videos than making voice calls, the trend to larger screen sizes makes sense, analysts said, but the newer half-foot phablets, or hybrid mobile device, may have crossed the line, analysts told us.

Potential second-half product delays across several categories could affect DTS revenues for the year, company executives said on the company’s Q2 earnings call late Thursday. DTS has adjusted its outlook as a result due to “uncertainties around the timing of certain CE, mobile and Play-Fi product shipments, which are now expected to push into 2014,” said Chief Financial Officer Mel Flanigan. He cautioned about a “modestly weakening near-term consumer electronic business environment” that has lowered expectations for home theater-in-a-box systems, Blu-ray players and automotive unit volumes. In addition, the company is projecting lower-than-expected royalty recoveries, Flanigan said. DTS expects 2013 revenue in the range of $130 million-$136 million, down from previous expectations of $140 million-$146 million, it said.