Rebecca Day

Walmart Entertainment announced its Vudu-based Disc-to-Digital service Tuesday at a news conference webcast. John Aden, executive vice president of general merchandise for Walmart, said the service would enable consumers to enjoy the content they already own on DVD “while unlocking value in the investment they've already made."

Despite a “rocky start and limited retailer support,” UltraViolet is the “single most important strategic initiative for film studios in 2012,” said a report on convergence released Monday from Equity Research. That comes on the eve of Walmart’s expected announcement Tuesday that its Vudu service will become the second online destination, after Flixster, for accessing UV files. Movie studios “continue to grapple” with declines in their largest revenue source -- home entertainment -- as growth in Blu-ray and digital have not offset a decline in DVD sales, at the same time consumers are transitioning from purchases to rental, the Equity report said.

The Superior Court of California, Santa Clara County, ruled in favor of DVD CCA Friday in its suit against Kaleidescape, saying Kaleidescape “is in breach” of the CSS License Agreement, according to court documents. The court had issued a tentative judgment in January in support of DVD CCA claims that Kaleidescape’s DVD servers violated the agreement (CED Feb 1 p4).

The disruption of cable by OTT video has been greatly exaggerated, said panelists at Digital Hollywood’s Media Summit Wednesday in New York. Some OTT services will survive, many won’t, and consumers will likely adopt a multi-format approach to TV viewing in the future, panelists said. While cord-cutting isn’t happening in large numbers, “cord-nevers” coming out of college present a challenge to the pay TV industry, they said.

Following its plan to be a “disruptive force” in the radio business, Pandora said in its fiscal Q4 earnings webcast Tuesday it expects to be “larger than the largest FM or AM radio station in most markets in the U.S.” by the end of the year. With significant growth in listener hours, the Internet radio company’s relevance to traditional radio advertising buyers “is skyrocketing,” said CEO Joe Kennedy.

Potentially slow adoption of Blu-ray players, and competition from streaming content where there’s no standard for multi-channel audio, could strike a blow to future DTS, Inc. revenue, the company said in its 10-K filed with the SEC last week. Blu-ray is a “significant driver” of the high-definition audio company’s revenue and future growth, the company said.

A headphone market shakeout is looming even as more manufacturers are planning to enter the business, hoping to grab share from an $828 million-and-growing annual business, according to CEA projections. Personal media devices including smartphones and tablets are expanding a market propelled by the iPod, which makes tracking the market a challenge due to the diverse range of use cases and types. When we plugged in “headphone” during a recent Amazon search, it returned 160,631 options.

Enterprising retailers took advantage of the extra day in February to hawk CE goods at bargain-bin prices, Consumer Electronics Daily found Tuesday. Hhgregg sent out an email Tuesday night to subscribers announcing, “You will Leap for Savings tonight at 9 p.m.” in its 12-hour online sale. Online shoppers using a promo code received 10 percent off already appealing prices.

Sony borrowed from the SURE program in its digital camera line to try to bring price stability to TVs (CED Feb 28 p1), a company spokesman told Consumer Electronics Daily. “Sony Electronics is placing all 2012 EX- and HX- series Bravia televisions on its SURE unilateral pricing program when they ship,” he said. In addition, models from the 2011 line -- the XBR-55/65HX929, KDL-65HX729 and KDL-60EX720 -- will also be placed on the SURE program beginning April 1, he said. “Our objective is to provide a consistent business opportunity for retailers to get behind Sony,” he said. The policy, which applies to all dealers, was put in place “to make it easier for retailers to do business with Sony,” he told us, saying the program has been “successfully deployed for years” with Sony’s Alpha and E-Mount digital cameras. Sony will enforce the policy through a third-party organization to monitor pricing in the market, he said. Also, resellers “may forward potential SURE violations directly to Sony,” he said. Dealers we spoke to at the HES Summit in Orlando were supportive of the move. “I'm all for it,” said Bjorn Dybdahl, owner of Bjorn’s in San Antonio, Texas. The unified pricing policies Sony and Samsung are promising “could be a positive for us,” Dybdahl said. The underlying issue, he said, is enforcement. “It’s up to them to make sure it works,” he said. “If I abide by the rules and they enforce it, it’s a win-win-win for everybody,” he said. Recently, the only winner in the chain has been the consumer, he said. Regarding whether customers will pay more for TVs in the age of year-round Black Friday pricing, Dybdahl said, “We're still in business because we're able to get a little more money for the product. When everybody’s on an equal footing, it comes down to how good we are as a retailer in servicing the customer,” he said. “If a TV is going to cost more than a similar TV from two months ago, I don’t think it’s going to be a big deal,” Dybdahl said. Vance Pflanz, owner of Pflanz Electronics in Sioux City, Iowa, said Sony’s SURE pricing on ES series audio products has worked “pretty well” and he hopes the same success translates to video. Despite shrinking video margins, Pflanz hasn’t been cutting back on TV sales. “We're working with manufacturers on select products with margin,” he said. Sony’s new $25,000 4K projector fits that bill, he said. Regarding past unsuccessful efforts by video suppliers to maintain unilateral pricing policies, Dybdahl of Bjorn’s said the situation is more serious now, which should make the policies stick. “I don’t think they were losing as much money in the past,” he said. When you have large, large companies losing the amounts of money being lost, what’s their choice?” Another company, which he declined to name, has been working for “months and months” on a profitable pricing strategy, he said. “If they don’t enforce it, then the credibility is gone, and it could very well mean the demise of some vendors.” And that’s the reason Jim Ristow, executive vice president of Home Entertainment Source, believes the policies will work, he told us. It comes down to “fortitude,” Ristow said. “The financial realities many companies are facing if they don’t do this,” make it a necessity to enforce the policies, he said. “Before it was, ‘we should do this.’ Now it’s, ‘we need to do this.'”

ORLANDO -- The Home Entertainment Source’s Connected Source store-within-a-store concept is still in flux a year after the idea was first floated to dealers, Executive Vice President Jim Ristow told Consumer Electronics Daily Tuesday at the group’s 2012 Summit. “The reason it took so long to do the betas was a lot of it was behind the scenes, not the actual implementation of the store,” he said. Implementation is 90 percent complete and will enable members to scale the Connected Source space as needed, Ristow said. Talk of the Town in Allendale, N.J., was one of the first test sites, and HES is eying 25-50 installations by year-end, Ristow said.