Rebecca Day

Credit service company Think Finance is extending its Presta lease-purchase payment solution to online retailers, Kathy Boden Holland, Think Finance executive vice president-corporate development, told Consumer Electronics Daily. Presta launched in fall 2011 (CED Oct 21/11 p1) with its online lease-purchase model for credit-challenged consumers, giving them a way to buy items -- largely consumer electronics -- by ordering products online for immediate delivery and making fixed payments over a year. The company announced its first electronics retail partner, Electronic Express, this week and plans to add several others over the next few months, Holland said.

Sony is taking a demographic approach to distribution as it seeds the market with Ultra HD 4K TV, Executive Vice President Michael Fasulo told Consumer Electronics Daily. As the company introduces 4K to stores -- currently some 1,600 in select digital marketing areas (DMAs) -- it’s looking at ZIP codes where consumers have paid more than $2,500 for TVs rather than targeting a certain size store or chain, he said. “We didn’t look at retailer X across the nation or retailer Y in a geographic area,” he said. Instead, the company used data from CEA, NPD and its own point-of-sale information to determine where “the consumer that has the highest propensity to buy this type of experience lives” and then located Sony retailers in those neighborhoods to launch the new TVs, he said. “We looked at this from a consumer-in perspective, not a product-out perspective,” Fasulo said. The list condensed to 12 DMAs, which he declined to break out.

Facing an aging customer base and known for a two-channel legacy, Thiel Audio is continuing to define its role in a transitioning speaker market, National Sales Manager Stephen DeFuria told Consumer Electronics Daily. DeFuria, following the departure last month of Director of Product Development Gary Dayton, is leading the initiative for new product development at the Lexington, Ky.-based company, work which “Thiel desperately needs at this point,” DeFuria said.

Monitor Audio at CE Week bowed a trio of AirPlay-enabled products: a tabletop amplifier/speaker system, a streaming amplifier and a soundbar for TVs 40 inches and larger. The bi-amplified speakers in the 150-watt S300 tabletop system are “a cut above” mainstream AirPlay products on the market due in part to an equalization circuit that’s designed to compensate for boundary effects and room acoustics, Jay O'Brian, sales director, told Consumer Electronics Daily. When the unit is turned on for the first time after plug-in, the processor automatically sends out a test tone and then measures the results captured by a built-in microphone to determine the frequency response of the room. The processor compares the room response against an ideal sound curve and adjusts the balance of the system to match, O'Brian said. For customers happy with their own speakers, Monitor will ship in late September the $500 AirStream 100, a 50-watt-per-channel, multi-zone streaming Class A/B amplifier with a high-resolution digital-to-analog converter, a USB input for charging devices and a subwoofer output. In addition, Monitor’s $1,600 ASB-2 is the company’s first active soundbar, O'Brian said. It decodes a Dolby Digital or DTS soundtrack through a proprietary processor, he said. Monitor bills the sub as a “party box” that allows friends to connect their mobile devices wirelessly directly via AirPlay. The sub plays files up to 24-bit/96 kHz resolution, and has three HDMI inputs and an HDMI output with Audio Return Channel, according to literature. The 160-watt system is powered by five Class D amplifiers, it said. The ASB-2 will be in stores this fall, O'Brian said.

Gefen, a longtime supplier of the pieces and parts that connect devices in a networked AV system, is now expanding into home automation with its own solution, Randy Wilson, marketing director, told Consumer Electronics Daily at CE Week. The GAVA (Gefen Audio/Video Automation) system will be a lower cost alternative for custom installers than high-end custom systems from home control superpowers Crestron and AMX. Gefen’s simpler system will compete with URC’s Total Home Control, among others, Wilson said.

Fast-paced sales of smartphones and tablets are laying the foundation for the second-screen ecosystem, panelists said at CE Week. The installed base of devices that are part of the second-screen experience is seeing an “explosion” of growth, said Shawn DuBravac, CEA director-research. Some 40 percent of U.S. households have a tablet, up from 22 percent in 2012 and 11 percent the year before. Density of tablet ownership is also on the rise, growing from 1.4 tablets per owning household in 2012 to 1.5 this year, DuBravac said. Smartphones were in 46 percent of households last year and that rate has pushed past half of U.S. households in 2013, he said.

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.

CEA President Gary Shapiro hailed Aereo’s streaming-video service as a technology “disrupter” in his keynote Q&A with Aereo CEO and founder Chet Kanojia at CE Week. Calling Aereo’s TV service the kind of innovation that government shouldn’t “mess up,” Shapiro referred back to the Betamax case that set a precedent for a recording product to be legal “if it has significant legal uses and the legal use is recording over-the-air broadcasts.” The Sony v. Universal case opened the door for a “whole range of technology to come in,” Shapiro said. The decision defined the CE industry for the next 30 years, he said.

The automotive aftermarket is in a “transition period” where traditional businesses are changing very quickly, said Audiovox President Tom Malone on the “Keeping Pace with CE” panel, part of the Connected Car Conference during CE Week in New York. Core categories are evolving as car makers are giving consumers more of the connected infotainment features they're looking for in their vehicles, Malone said.

Combined worldwide shipments of PCs, tablets and smartphones are projected to reach 2.35 billion units this year, up 5.9 percent from 2012, according to Gartner. The market is being driven by sales in tablets, smartphones and ultramobile PCs, while desktop and notebook PC shipments are forecast to drop 10.6 percent from 341 million units last year to 305 million in 2013 and 289 million units in 2014, it said. A sharp decline in Q1 PC sales was due to a change in consumer preferences and to an adjustment in the sales channel to make room for new products hitting the market in the second half of 2013, Gartner said.