Rebecca Day

AudioSource is continuing to pull back from the custom installation market while leveraging its digital amplifier technology to meet a broader customer base, CEO Tom O'Mara told us on a press tour in New York Monday. “We've been spending a lot of time reinventing the company and changing where we want to put the focus,” O'Mara said. The custom installation business “wasn’t ever going to come back from where it was in 2006 and 2007,” he said, so AudioSource started to look at growth categories to diversify its business. “We took our engineering and audio prowess and put them in places where things were changing,” he said. It’s also phasing out architectural speakers on the custom side, he said.

The long-rumored Apple TV might be more profitable as an iOS platform available to TV manufacturers, posited NPD DisplaySearch analyst Paul Gray in a blog post Friday. Gray cited comments on opening APIs to developers by Apple CEO Tim Cook last week at All Things Digital’s D11 conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. Cook said Apple will “open up more in the future, but not to the degree that we put the customer at risk of having a bad experience."

Forecasts for UltraViolet to reach 65 million active users by 2018 are jeopardized by key players not supporting the ecosystem, said a report by ABI Research. “After a shaky start, UltraViolet is starting to pick up steam,” said analyst Michael Inouye, but key players Apple, Disney and Amazon have yet to embrace the digital content locker format backed by Sony, Warner Bros., Paramount, RIAA, Best Buy, Walmart and numerous hardware companies.

Now is the time for service providers looking to broaden their subscriber base to enter the connected home space, said Bill Scheffler, senior director-North American business development for Z-Wave at Sigma Designs, during a Parks Associates webcast Thursday. Prospective entrants to the market have to consider the right technology for mass consumer adoption and choose an established ecosystem with other partner companies for interoperability. Scheffler said Z-Wave is dominant among security providers in the connected home market.

The amount of choice consumers have in video content is “overwhelming and chaotic,” TiVo CEO Tom Rogers said Thursday at the Sanford Bernstein investor conference in New York. Citing the addition of subscription VOD, traditional VOD and content from aggregators including Netflix and Vudu to linear TV channels, Rogers said the “march of ongoing choice” is the overall theme of the media landscape. TiVo wants to “provide order” to the chaos and help consumers get to what matters to them, Rogers said. The company also desperately wants a bigger chunk of the set-top business as cable operators evolve from quadrature amplitude modulation to Internet Protocol TV world.

Strong demand trends and moderating supply trends are pointing to an “extended period of stability” for the NAND flash industry for the near future, said Sanjay Mehrotra, CEO of SanDisk, at the Sanford Bernstein investor conference in New York Wednesday. Demand trends for tablets, smartphones and ultrathin PCs are creating strong long-term trends for flash memory in the future while supply growth is being limited by increased complexity, lower bit growth from technology transitions and a lower rate of capacity expansion due to lower return on investment and higher capital expenditure costs.

Tablet shipments are forecast to grow 58 percent this year to 229.3 million units, passing notebook PC shipments, which are declining the second straight year, according to IDC. Notebook PC sales are expected to fall from 200.9 million units in 2012 to 187.4 million worldwide this year, IDC said. By 2015, IDC predicts tablet shipments will outpace notebooks and desktops combined. “What started as a sign of tough economic times has quickly shifted to a change in the global computing paradigm with mobile being the primary benefactor,” said Ryan Reith, program manager at IDC. Tablets surpassing notebook PCs this year “marks a significant change” in consumer attitudes about computing and “the applications and ecosystems that power them,” Reith said. PCs will still play an “important role” going forward, primarily among business users, but for many consumers a tablet is a “simple and elegant solution” for use cases previously delivered by a PC, he said.

Pandora Chief Financial Officer Michael Herring left the door open to a subscription fee hike, on the company’s fiscal Q1 2014 earnings call after regular U.S. markets closed Thursday. Pandora’s conversions from free listeners to paid subscribers was higher than expected after it instituted a listening cap on mobile devices in March, but the company has said in the past that it generates more revenue from the ad-supported part of the business than from its $36 yearly subscription fee (CED May 16 p8). Herring said Pandora has had the same pricing since it launched, while competing services “tend to raise prices over time.” While “that’s not been Pandora’s route to market to date,” he said, the company has “ever-rising costs” and the possibility of a fee increase is something “we look at very closely.” A subscription increase “is definitely on the table,” he said.

TVs and small electronics were among the featured CE products in Memorial Day sales advertised Friday on retailers’ websites. Hhgregg tossed in a free 32-inch LED-lit LCD TV with the purchase of a Serta or Tempurpedic mattress set priced $999 and up, according to the ad, which specified that the TV had to be purchased in store before consumers would receive a $200 rebate in the form of a prepaid Visa card.

Hisense, Walmart and Nvidia threw down the gauntlet in the tablet market Thursday, jointly unveiling in New York a loaded 7-inch tablet with an Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core processor that will begin selling Friday exclusively at Walmart for $149. They're the first Hisense tablets to be sold in the U.S., and comparable models aren’t currently being sold in the China market, Peter Erdman, Hisense vice president-consumer electronics, told Consumer Electronics Daily.