Rebecca Day

A drop in hardware sales led a 26 percent decline in overall U.S. videogame industry sales for July to $707 million from that month last year. Videogame sales suffered their lowest month since October 2006, according to NPD sales data. Hardware sales fell 29 percent to $223 million as the average selling price for consoles remained flat. Videogame software sales for consoles and portables tumbled 17 percent to $336 million, while sales of videogame accessories slipped 8 percent to $127 million, NPD said. Total videogame software sales were down 30 percent to $357 million, including PC games, it said.

Hit by vehicle production disruptions from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and a rise in the price of neodymium for magnets used in high-end loudspeakers, Harman International said net income plunged 86 percent from a year ago in its fiscal Q4 to $18.87 million. Revenue of $1 billion for Q4 2011 compared with $850 million for the 2010 quarter, the company said. While “revenues were strong” in the company’s infotainment business, said CEO Dinesh Paliwal, they couldn’t “offset the loss of profit associated with the change in product mix,” resulting in a hit of 30 cents of earnings per share in the quarter, he said. Increases in July indicate the situation “is improving,” he said, and the company expects vehicle production to return to normal levels in the near term.

Maintaining a cautious approach based on “growing concerns” about the macro-economy, DTS scaled back projections for the year in its fiscal 2011 forecast. It shaved revenue projections from $100 million-$105 million to $95 million-$100 million, CEO Jon Kirchner said on the company’s Q2 earnings call late Monday. For Q2, the company saw growth from Blu-ray, network-connected devices and automotive markets, offset by low recovery payments and “softer than expected” game console revenue, he said. Blu-ray revenue, including standalone players and PCs, was up 34 percent in Q2 year over year, the company said.

Calling Q2 financial results “murky,” Dish Network CEO Joseph Clayton, former Frontier Communications and RCA executive, said in an earnings call that results were clouded by startup operations for Blockbuster, accruals against possible litigation settlements, financial payments resulting from the TiVo settlement and the “destructive discounting” taking place in the video market. The increasingly saturated pay TV market has “slowed dramatically,” Clayton said, and growth rates will be slower even as the economy and new housing markets rebound. Dish lost 135,000 subscribers during Q2, which Clayton called “likely-to-churn” customers the company deemed “low-margin” subscribers it chose not to chase. Dish dialed back on marketing and advertising dollars in Q2, he said, calling it a “possible overcorrection” strategy, but said that “won’t be the case as we move into the second half of the year."

Within months of Panasonic and Xpand announcing M-3DI, a standard for 3D active-shutter eyewear (CED March 29 p4), and RealD’s licensing agreement with Samsung’s LCD unit for active-shutter 3D technology viewable through RealD glasses, three of the four companies joined forces with Sony on a new technology standard for consumer 3D active glasses under the name “Full HD 3D Glasses Initiative.” According to a prepared statement from Samsung, Sony, Panasonic and Xpand, the standardization encompasses RF and IR protocols including M-3DI and proprietary protocols from Samsung and Sony. Chips will be provided by Broadcom, Nordic and CSR, according to a Bluetooth spokeswoman.

A week after AT&T’s decision to drop ESPN 3D from its U-Verse programming package, the programmer rebounded with plans to double its 3D coverage of college football games this season. ESPN 3D will show 20 regular-season college football games plus five post-season bowl games and the Allstate BCS National Championship, it said. Coverage begins Sept. 1 with UNLV vs. Wisconsin, followed by Miami at Maryland Sept. 5, Arizona at Oklahoma State Sept. 8, BYU at Texas Sept. 10, LSU at Mississippi State Sept. 15, NC State at Cincinnati Sept. 22, and South Florida at Pittsburgh Sept. 29. California at Oregon Oct. 6, USC at California Oct. 13, UCLA at Arizona Oct. 20, Virginia at Miami Oct. 27, Northern Illinois at Toledo Nov. 1, USC at Colorado Nov. 4, North Carolina at Virginia Tech Nov. 17 and West Virginia at South Florida Dec. 1. Four games are to be determined later, and additional games will be announced during the season, ESPN said. The network will continue to handle 3D coverage with one truck, an ESPN spokeswoman told us. She said there are no plans “at this time” for National Football League or post-season Major League Baseball coverage in 3D. Sony is a sponsor of the 3D college football games.

Dolby hopes to make up future lost revenue from the upcoming Windows 8 operating system through its OEM and Independent Software Vendor (ISV) business and online content, CEO Kevin Yeaman said in the company’s Q3 earnings call Thursday. Yeaman said Dolby’s mix of licensing revenue in recent years “has increasingly shifted toward the operating system” as its technologies have been included in four editions of Windows 7. But Dolby recently learned its technologies “are not included in the Windows 8 operating system that’s under development,” Yeaman said. If Dolby is not part of the commercial version of Windows 8,the company expects to support DVD playback functionality in PCs “by increasingly licensing our technologies directly to OEMs and ISVs and will seek to extend technologies to further support online content playback,” he said.

Russound, following a “rough few years” in the custom installation business, is expanding to the “volume retail market,” CEO Charlie Porritt told Consumer Electronics Daily on a press tour in Manhattan Wednesday. The company is selling a “select number” of products through Best Buy and Crutchfield, he said, and the announcement marks the first step in the brand’s “measured expansion” into the retail market, Porritt said.

AT&T’s decision to drop ESPN 3D was one of the recent events that led BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield, a frequent detractor of the format, to posit that it’s dead-on-arrival in the home, in a blog post Tuesday. In addition to AT&T’s decision, which it said was due to low customer interest and price, Greenfield cited comments by Electronic Arts Chief Financial Officer John Riccitiello last week that EA hasn’t seen a big uptake for 3D gaming (CED Aug 1 p9) in the home, “at least not yet.” In addition, Greenfield opined, “The Nintendo 3DS has also been a complete failure, with Nintendo recently having to drastically cut price just three months after the product’s debut.” He cited a study reported in the July 21 issue of The Journal of Vision, which Greenfield said showed that “discomfort and fatigue from 3D were greater at short viewing distances” such as those for TV viewing.

The first Intel Ultrabook-based laptop is expected to hit stores by back-to-school season, Greg Welch, Intel OTG segment director for mobile client platforms, told Consumer Electronics Daily at the company’s holiday gift event in New York Tuesday. He wouldn’t disclose details but said more are due by the holiday season, with the next wave following around CES time in early January.