Rebecca Day

Free 32-inch TVs for appliance purchases at hhgregg will be determined based on TV selection at individual stores, Jeff Pearson, senior vice president-marketing, told us. The hhgregg appliance promotion (CED Dec 11 p3), which began Dec. 3 and runs through Saturday, rewards customers who buy four Whirlpool, Electrolux, GE and LG kitchen appliances with a $200 rebate when they buy a 32-inch TV as well. The customer “essentially receives a free 32-inch HDTV with the purchase of a four-piece kitchen package,” Pearson told us. A separate deal is available for customers of Samsung appliances, who will receive a $200 rebate if they buy a Samsung kitchen package, Pearson said. In our scan of the hhgregg website Tuesday, of the 14 available 32-inch TVs shown online, the least expensive 32-inch model was a Hisense model listed for $219. The deal is only good in stores.

Kaleidescape, Hollywood’s legal scapegoat for the digital content age, has emerged as a digital download trailblazer with the announcement Monday of the Kaleidescape Store. The purchase and download website is stocked at the onset with roughly 3,000 films and 8,000 TV episodes from Warner Bros. Digital Distribution. After years of ongoing legal wrangling with the DVD CCA over the Content Scramble System used in DVDs, Kaleidescape appears to have rebounded comfortably with a Hollywood-sanctioned method for delivering bit-for-bit video downloads to Kaleidescape servers.

An hourly worker at Walmart is leading a Web-based employee group formed in opposition to labor-backed groups, including OURWalmart, that have been protesting worker conditions and rights at the retailer, we learned from an unsigned email sent to us Monday as an FYI from Walmart’s corporate PR department in Bentonville, Ark. The email included a quote in the Monday issue of Supermarket News from the worker, Brandon Evano, a five-year employee of the Montoursville Walmart in north-central Pennsylvania. Evano told Consumer Electronics Daily he recently took over the group, Associates Who Love Walmart, which was started last year by another employee who had to relinquish leadership when he took a salaried managerial post.

PC sales continue to struggle while tablets, soundbars and headphones are enjoying sales growth, Stephen Baker, NPD analyst, told us Monday as the holiday season enters its fourth week. Despite “some interest” in Windows 8 touchscreen products at the high end of the PC market, “there are very few SKUs out there and they're pretty expensive,” Baker said. “From a unit or dollar perspective, that’s not enough to turn around the PC market,” he said.

Original design manufacturer Tymphany has teamed up with Qualcomm Atheros to co-develop multi-room audio products built around Qualcomm Atheros’ Wi-Fi-based Skifta audio platform, executives from both companies told Consumer Electronics Daily Friday. The companies will show a Skifta powered speaker system prototype off-site at CES with the hopes of landing partners for the open-architecture platform as an alternative to AirPlay. They hope the platform will be commercialized in audio speakers and components in late 2013 or early 2014, said Gary Brotman, director of product marketing for Qualcomm Atheros.

After establishing a name at retail as a low-cost means to obtain smart TV, Roku is looking “beyond the box,” with eyes on cable partnerships and integrated TV deals for future growth of its video streaming platform, said Steve Shannon, general manager-content and services, at the UBS conference in New York.

Netflix won’t raise subscription rates to pay for the multi-year Disney distribution deal announced Wednesday, said Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos at the UBS conference Wednesday in New York. Sarandos said the company’s focus is on “how great a product can you build for that low subscription price,” while “remaining profitable.”

An unexpected 5.6 percent falloff in CE retail sales revenue for the Black Friday period was due largely to declining categories such as point-and-shoot cameras, MP3 players, GPS devices and camcorders, said NPD’s weekly tracking service report released Tuesday. Revenue for GPS units and camcorders -- once “high-gifting” categories -- fell 40 percent each for the Black Friday 2012 period of Nov. 18-24 compared with last year’s Black Friday run, NPD said. MP3 players plummeted 24 percent in units and 23 percent in revenue, while ASP’s slipped from $124 to $121, NPD said.

TiVo has “reinvented the notion of what we should be,” said CEO Tom Rogers at the UBS annual Global Media and Communications Conference on Monday. Nine of the top 21 U.S. TV service providers have signed with TiVo for advanced television solutions, “and no one else has anything close to that kind of following among the operator base,” Rogers said. This follows a perception in the industry as “the guys who had been rejected by the cable industry” because cable operators found their own DVR solutions and “people thought TiVo had been passed over,” Rogers said.

Former Thiel President Kathy Gornik will not be part of the new Thiel, “at least for now,” said new CEO Bill Thomas, who’s been recovering from knee replacement surgery in Nashville, since the announcement of his group’s purchase of Thiel from Gornik last week. Thomas said he hoped Gornik would change her mind about a role in the company “because we could use her wisdom and knowledge,” but Thomas told us Gornik has retired. A Thiel spokesman reiterated that Gornik has made no official announcement of the deal or her future plans. Terms of the deal haven’t been made public.