Rebecca Day

Home theater continues to be a “very challenging market space,” Planar Systems CEO Gerry Perkel said on the company’s fiscal Q2 earnings call late Wednesday. Revenue in home theater products was lower year over year and customers “are still buying products,” he said, but it’s “nowhere near at the rate that they were a year ago.” Trends playing out throughout the TV market toward lower-priced purchases are evident at Planar, too, where “a year or two or three ago people might have been spending a little bit more per projector or per home theater construction project” but that spending is now “a little bit less” with “some lower cost products,” he said.

CEA and CEDIA’s R10 Residential Systems committee announced Thursday two new standards for home theater design and installation of smart grid devices. The revision of CEA/CEDIA-CEB23 outlines theater installation and performance recommendations for the design of high-performance home theaters to “meet or exceed the commercial theater experience,” said Dave Pedigo, senior director of technology at CEDIA. Pedigo told us the home theater standard includes a “minor tweak” of the original standard, addressing industry experts’ concerns about suggested viewing heights of screens. Primary seating distance is still referred to as generally three times the height of the screen, Pedigo said, adding that viewing distance is also a function of a client’s preferred seating in commercial theaters. Because the document has ANSI accreditation, a revision requires a formal process to make any changes, Pedigo said. Regarding wording in the document about a home theater “exceeding the performance of a commercial theater,” Pedigo said the standard, which covers video quality, now includes a recommendation for brightness as measured in foot-lamberts. While a commercial theater has a foot-lambert rating of 14, the recommendation for the home theater is 28 foot-lamberts to take into account the degradation of lamp brightness that happens “pretty quickly” following installation of a projector, as well as the effect of 3D glasses, which reduce the brightness of an image. “If you can double the light you have a better 3D experience,” Pedigo said. CEA/CEDIA-CEB29, meanwhile, a standard for the installation of smart grid devices, provides a basic understanding of issues covering the proper installation, protection and connection of smart grid devices, according to the trade groups. The groups position CEA/CEDIA-CEB29 as a “a starting point for consumers, installers and companies involved in the buying, developing or installing of smart grid technologies and devices.” Pedigo said the standard is largely directed toward manufacturers to ensure that signals running over power lines aren’t corrupted by electromechanical interference. “It’s a little early for our members to utilize what’s in the document,” Pedigo said, referring to electronic systems contractors. “The smart grid still has a long way to go,” he said, “but this was written in advance of products so that we're ahead of the game when products do start coming out in the next couple of years.”

Media tablets missed sales targets for the first time in Q1 led by a steep drop in shipments of Android-based tablets, according to International Data Corp.’s quarterly tablet and e-reader tracker. Worldwide tablet shipments for the quarter totaled 17.4 million units in Q1, coming in 1.2 million units below IDC’s projection for Q1, it said. IDC had predicted a seasonal drop of 34 percent from Q4’s 28.2 million shipments, but the actual decline was 38 percent below projections, it said. Year-over-year growth for the developing category was 120 percent, up from 7.9 million units in Q1 2011, IDC said.

Consumers’ growing appetite for a better audio experience on the road is driving renewed interest in surround sound in vehicles, Alan Cohen, vice president of marketing at DTS, told Consumer Electronics Daily. After announcing last week that China-based automaker BYD would install DTS Digital Surround in model year 2013 vehicles this summer, the company told us Wednesday that two U.S. automakers will also launch DTS-certified surround systems this summer for vehicle year 2013. Vehicle maker names were not available due to confidentiality agreements. DTS Digital Surround was launched in 2009 and is currently available on Lincoln vehicles, said Keith Burnett, vice president of home AV and automotive for DTS. Some 1,500 FM radio stations in the U.S. transmit DTS Neural Surround signals, he said. The most recent figures the company could cite for programming data showed that in the top 15 metropolitan markets in 2009, 29 percent of stations broadcast DTS Neural Surround-encoded material during rush hour drive time between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m., according to data from CEA and NAB. In 2010, some 650 stations were broadcasting in Neural Surround, according to data. DTS announced at NAB that the Guangzhou Broadcasting Network and an Anhui FM radio station are the first to offer surround sound radio broadcasts in China and additional stations are performing internal evaluations of the technology, Burnett said. Neural Surround technology can be carried on both digital and analog frequencies, and in the U.S. it works in parallel with many HD radio broadcasts in digital broadcasts. China’s FM radio infrastructure is all-analog currently, Burnett said. China eventually is expected to convert to digital FM broadcasts, but the DTS short-term roadmap is “an analog strategy,” he said. Unlike in the U.S. where consumers are purchasing fewer CDs in favor of streamed or downloaded digital music, the China CD market “has taken hold,” Cohen said. Roughly 600 CDs have been encoded in DTS-HD for the China market to meet the “appetite for high-quality audio” both in cars and home, he said. A DTS spokeswoman added that DTS is integrating with companies including Rovi, Digital Rapids and castLabs to help create end-to-end encoding/decoding solutions that are compatible with the UltraViolet ecosystem.

The mobile business, driven by HDMI and MHL (Mobile High-Definition Link), was up in Q1 at Silicon Image, offsetting a 17 percent decline in the company’s CE segment versus Q1 2011, said CEO Camillo Martino on the company’s earnings call Tuesday. Silicon Image’s CE segment faced “continuing challenges” in the quarter as its CE revenue was “less than expected,” Martino said, citing “billions of dollars” in losses from tier one TV manufacturers in a business that “still has not stabilized.” The company forecasts volatility will continue through the year before stabilizing in 2013, Martino said, when Silicon’s InstaPrevue technology, investments in the home theater product line and “potential for new MHL and HDMI specifications” are expected to bear fruit.

Netflix’s addition of 1.7 million streaming subscribers in Q1 was offset by a loss of 1.1 million DVD customers, the company said in its 10-Q filing Friday at the SEC. On March 31, Netflix reported 22 million paid streaming customers, up from 20.1 million at the end of December. Paid DVD subscribers fell from roughly 11 million to 9.9 million from Q4 to Q1, the company said. The company’s new subscriptions historically have been highest in the first and fourth quarters, it said, with the lowest net subscription adds coming in Q2. The ratio of streaming to disc subscriptions is in line with company projections that “the DVD portion of our domestic service will be a fading differentiator to our streaming success."

A 34 percent surge in revenue at Coinstar in Q1 was driven primarily by growth in Redbox receipts, the company said late Thursday in its Q1 earnings call. Redbox revenue grew 39 percent to $502.9 million on increases in same store sales, new kiosk installations, strength of new releases and “consumer acceptance” of the 20-cent DVD rental price increase implemented last fall, the company said. Overall Coinstar revenues were $568.2 million in Q1, it said.

Logitech exited fiscal 2012 “better than expected but far from where we need to be,” CEO Guerrino De Luca said Thursday on an earnings call, and the company’s goal now is to be “leaner, faster and simpler.” Sales for Q4 were $532 million, down 3 percent from $548 million in Q4 FY 2011, the company said, while operating income improved to $24 million from $4 million a year ago. Net income for Q4 2012 was $28 million, or $0.17 per share, compared with net income of $3 million, $0.02 per share, in Q4 of fiscal 2011, the company said. Gross margin for the 2012 quarter was 36.4 percent compared to 32.8 percent in the prior year.

Russound’s on-again, off-again relationship with Colorado vNet took a more decisive turn Wednesday with the announcement Russound has sold off Colorado vNet to a company formed by its sales and marketing vice president, Mike Anderson. Colorado vNet integrators have “needs unique to themselves” and the opportunity to set the company apart “under its own direction once again” gives the integrators the “support they deserve,” Anderson said in a statement Wednesday.

Pay-per-view TV is not on Netflix’s radar screen, CEO Reed Hastings said on an earnings call. “It would confuse the brand,” Hastings said, saying the company has built a “precise” model on $7.99 a month subscriptions, and that the market is well-stocked with other pay-per-view models from Amazon, Blockbuster, iTunes and more. He compared Netflix’s strategy with that of Dolby Digital -- “to be in every platform and get along with everyone.” The market is large enough at an $8 monthly subscription rate “to have us grow very large,” he said.