Rebecca Day

On the heels of a fiscal Q2 that “did not meet our expectations,” Harman is launching an infotainment services business to generate a consistent revenue stream that’s not dependent on automotive production cycles, CEO Dinesh Paliwal said on the company’s earnings call Thursday. The infotainment services business along with restructuring initiatives will reduce operating costs, provide recurrent revenue and drive two to three times higher margins, Paliwal said.

Dolby Labs doesn’t see a dual-format scenario playing out in the mobile streaming content space as it has in the DVD/Blu-ray category with Dolby and DTS, Ramzi Haidamus, executive vice president, sales and marketing, said on the company’s fiscal Q1 earnings call late Tuesday. Dolby is currently in “100 percent of all content delivery services,” and the company is “confident that we are providing the content delivery companies with everything they need,” Haidamus said. He called the “value proposition” Dolby offers content creators, distributors and playback device makers “complete” and added, “We frankly don’t see a reason why there would be a second offering at this point."

Netflix’s stock price has continued to ride the Wall St. euphoria from last week over its better-than-expected earnings on a subscription upturn, and now all eyes are on its first major original TV series, which launches Friday. Netflix stock jumped $43.60 to $146.86 last week in reaction to its earnings report, and closed Wednesday at $167.78, a level it hadn’t attained since Sept. 11, 2011, around the time that its pricing and subscription overhaul angered subscribers and sent many fleeing from the service.

"Big” is the theme of TV set discounts this week as retailers use the Big Game as a spur to drive store traffic -- in-store and online -- prior to Super Bowl Sunday. The front page of Target’s weekly circular trumpeted “Big Game Deals” and “Make the Big Game Bigger,” in a sale where every HDTV has been discounted, it said. In hhgregg’s Super Sale XLVII, prices advertised on the opening page of an e-mail promotion as “up to 30 percent off” actually exceeded those discount percentages by a substantial margin, we found in some cases.

Apple, through multiple contract manufacturers, accounted for 91 percent of Cirrus Logic sales in fiscal Q3 2013, the chip maker said in a 10-Q filing. Apple products’ share of Cirrus Logic sales rose in the first nine months of fiscal 2013 to 82 percent from 62 percent in fiscal 2012, the company said. Cirrus Logic reported fiscal Q3 sales of $310 million, up from $122 million in the year-ago quarter and profit of $68 million compared with $17 million in the fiscal 2012 quarter.

Netflix shares jumped $43.74, or 42 percent, to $147.00 Thursday on Q4 profit of $8 million, a boost in streaming subscriptions and better-than-expected financial results. Netflix lost 380,000 DVD subscribers in Q4, company executives said in letter to shareholders Wednesday, but it added more than two million streaming subscribers following a “particularly strong” holiday sales season.

"Battery life is a huge issue,” Google CEO Lawrence Page said about mobile devices on the company’s Q4 earnings call Tuesday. “You shouldn’t have to worry about constantly recharging your phone,” he said, and a phone “shouldn’t go splat” when dropped. “Everything should be faster and easier,” Page said. But Page wouldn’t elaborate on future product plans on the call, saying only that the company is working on the opportunities.

Harman has done “an incredible amount of work” to replace neodymium magnets in its audio products, Chris Dragon, senior director of global brand marketing, told Consumer Electronics Daily. Soaring prices of neodymium during the past couple of years (CED Aug 31/11 p1) took a toll on the bottom line at Harman and other consumer electronics manufacturers who used neodymium in magnets for its ability to provide exceptional strength in tiny form factors.

Reflecting the “challenging environment,” Intel PC Client Group revenue was down 6 percent in Q4 over the year-ago quarter to $8.5 billion, the company said in its earnings report. With “relatively soft PC demand and weak macroeconomic conditions,” Intel generated sales of $53.3 billion, operating income of $14.6 billion and $11 billion in profit in 2012, CEO Paul Otellini said on an earnings call last week. Otellini cited “tremendous progress” entering the smartphone and tablet markets, working with partners “to reinvent the PC” and continuing to drive growth in its data center.

Former SpeakerCraft President Jeremy Burkhardt is seeking damages and a declaratory ruling that his non-compete agreement against SpeakerCraft Inc., SpeakerCraft LLC, Linear Corp. and parent company Nortek has “expired,” according to a complaint Burkhardt filed in California Superior Court in Santa Ana. In the complaint, which was filed Nov. 9, but surfaced only recently, Burkhardt claims his former employer and its affiliates “are using a nine-year-old non-competition agreement that expired in 2008 to block him from earning a living in an industry to which he devoted substantially his entire adult life, to restrain him from working with others, and to dissuade others from working with and employing him.”