Rebecca Day

"Skittish” consumers and a tough environment have put CE inventory levels at close to historic lows in retail channels heading into the back half of the year, Shaun DuBravac, director of research at CEA, said during a keynote mid-year update at CE Week on Wednesday. Retailers are poised to boost late-season orders if early promotions in late October indicate a strong holiday sales season to come, he said, a pattern that played out last year and sent retailers scrambling to fill demand for TVs.

Vizio shed only a little more light on Google TV product plans when it responded to questions after our deadline late Tuesday. Vizio said it’s not providing an exact ship date at this time, but will provide an update in July, according to a spokesman. Vizio begins taking pre-orders on the $99.99 box in July, it said in a news release Tuesday. On how Vizio will position its V.I.A. (Vizio Internet Apps), which it calls a “passport to experiencing a whole new world of online content,” alongside Google TV, Vizio told us that Vizio Internet Apps Plus is still Vizio’s connected CE ecosystem that enables consumers to enjoy their favorite apps, services and content” over a consistent user experience that spans across multiple screens. In Co-Star, V.I.A. Plus “incorporates the latest Google TV release to deliver additional powerful capabilities like Chrome browser and Search which users cannot find in most other Smart TV experiences,” it said.

Pioneer announced at CE Week Tuesday night in New York that it’s the first CE company to incorporate two new wireless technologies into its products. The first is HTC Connect, which allows consumers to stream music files from an HTC smartphone to 2012 Pioneer and Elite networked receivers and a new line of Pioneer single-chassis wireless music systems due out this summer. The second is what Pioneer calls Wireless Direct, a feature included in the chipset BridgeCo supplies to Pioneer and others that also incorporates DLNA, AirPlay and streaming services, Russ Johnston, vice president for the home electronics division, told us. The “brand new” Wireless Direct feature, based on Wi-Fi, will appear in the market first on Pioneer’s XW-SMA1 ($299), XW-SMA3 ($399) and XW-SMA4 ($399) wireless speakers, and will serve as an independent Wi-Fi access point, allowing users to stream music in a peer-to-peer relationship from their smartphones to the wireless speakers when a Wi-Fi or home network isn’t available, Johnston said. The latter feature will be “broadly distributed” in the market, but not under the Wireless Direct name that’s proprietary to Pioneer, Johnston said.

Vizio announced its Google TV streaming player Tuesday, which will come in $100 below the NSZ-GS7 Internet Player with Google TV that Sony announced Monday. Vizio will begin taking orders on the Co-Star Stream Player ($99.99) next month at Vizio.com, the company said in a press release, but it didn’t disclose a delivery date for the product.

Media server company Mozaex has begun shipping the Chroma multi-room media server, which the company said is the first server to include both iTunes and a Blu-ray player. Chroma includes iBLU, which supports iTunes content and Blu-ray movies and iPlay, a feature that allows users to play their iTunes audio and video content using Apple’s iPad and iPhone remote apps. Mozaex said that its $2,995 server, which also supports UltraViolet, “legally plays Blu-rays and DVDs without an expensive, complicated disc changer.”

Take two of Google TV is coming into somewhat better focus as product pricing and availability plans have been released in advance of Google’s I/O developer conference that starts Wednesday in San Francisco.

Streaming media devices were out in full force at Pepcom’s Digital Experience in New York Thursday night. TiVo underscored its efforts to expand further into the cable operator market (CED June 1 p1), displaying its upcoming IP set-top box that will enable multi-room streaming from a main TiVo recorder to other TVs in the house. TiVo also showed Stream, a small module that will enable users to download content from a TiVo DVR to a tablet or smartphone.

Cadillac, playing technology catch-up to competitors such as BMW, Audi and Mercedes-Benz, held demos of its connected 2013 XTS sedan that’s shipping to dealers this week at the Classic Car Club in Manhattan. The company is rolling out its CUE (Cadillac User Experience) connected car technology as a standard feature in the XTS, and it will be offered in new Cadillac vehicles as they come out, Andy Gellatly, technical fellow for user interfaces at General Motors, told us behind the wheel of an XTS late Wednesday. Limited versions of the technology will be available for other GM cars in 2013, Gellatly said, but those won’t have the motion-sensing or haptics features of the full-featured CUE. MSRPs for the XTS range from $44,075 to $60,385 depending on feature package. The system is based around an 8-inch capacitive-touch display which shows navigation maps, audio settings, XM and Internet radio station information and media stored on a user’s smartphone or tablet. Each XTS buyer gets a free iPad, Cadillac said. A compartment under the dash is designed to conceal the user’s connected phone or tablet, which, when paired with the unit, provides the wireless broadband connection for the system. Standout features of the CUE include haptics that provide a light “thump” to a user’s finger when pressed to indicate a command was received, Gellatly said, since capacitive screens rely on visual feedback. The screen goes dark when not used for 20 seconds or so, but users can wake it up quickly to see a song title by approaching the screen with their hand, which brings a screen alive through motion-sensing, he said. Users can place calls, requests points of interest and access music and radio stations by artist, track or channel name using speech recognition as well, he said, while demonstrating the speech-recognition feature. In our demo, the system interpreted “Blues Brothers” as “Blues Traveler,” though. Cadillac has a few apps at launch for the phone with more to come, Gellatly said. Having an application framework in place and a public software development kit -- along with the ability to leverage a smartphone’s data plan -- makes the future capability of CUE “open-ended,” Gellatly said. Cadillac will certify all apps to ensure they meet certain standards, including that they don’t lead to driver distraction, he said. Design work on CUE was done at GM’s tech center in Warren, Mich., Gellatly said. He wouldn’t provide the name of components suppliers.

The “market place changed” and Best Buy “didn’t recognize the changes taking place,” interim Best Buy CEO Mike Mikan told shareholders at the annual meeting in Richfield, Minn., Thursday. So Best Buy is working on a plan to “reposition its leadership” in the retail market by changing the way “we think and act” and connecting with customers “in a much deeper way,” Mikan said. Calling Best Buy’s operating performance “well below our full potential,” Mikan said he spent the last few months visiting stores across the country talking to employees and customers. While he praised the company’s people, assets and potential, Mikan said “we could have done a better job of demonstrating that."

Media server company Autonomic could sell an SSD-based server within the next 12-18 months, CEO Michael de Nigris, told Consumer Electronics Daily in an interview Thursday. “We're watching that market very closely, de Nigris said. The cost benefit of solid-state drives is still a “little bit out of skew with magnetic hard drives,” especially given the company’s ability to back up to the cloud and to other locations, he said, which makes “redundancy less of a concern,” he said. If Autonomic’s audio server were a standalone device with no backup facility, the company would go the SSD route quicker, and “dealers would probably be willing to pay the premium to have it” for the reliability, he said. Cost per gigabyte of SSD is “still quite high,” but the company will “arrive there when the time is right,” he said. De Nigris anticipates a “pretty rapid decline” in the price of SSDs as more tablets, smartphones and computers with SSD storage hit the market. Autonomic announced Thursday it has expanded into an 8,000-square-foot fulfillment facility in Armonk, N.Y., that will complement its West Coast shipping center and improve shipping speed to dealers on the East Coast, de Nigris said. Component manufacturing for semiconductors and hard drives is done in China with assembly handled in Armonk and the company’s California facility, he said. The company recently released the Mirage Media Server MMS-5A for single- and multi-room audio distribution. The MMS-5A synchs with other Mirage servers in different locations, along with offering remote library access from around the world, according to literature. The MMS-5 will get an update to support video, and the company has “something in the wings” for later this year that will be previewed at CEDIA, de Nigris said.