Rebecca Day

Calling the CE industry a “bright spot in a very cloudy economy,” CEA CEO Gary Shapiro welcomed attendees Thursday to “CE Week” festivities in New York in a keynote in which he urged senate passage of the Spectrum Act (S-911), which would promote incentive spectrum auctions. The bill cleared the Senate Commerce Committee June 7.

Vizio aims to be “disruptive” in the LED lamp business in the same way it hijacked the LED-based LCD TV market to reach the No. 1 sales position, co-founder Ken Lowe said on the “Green and Clean” panel late Wednesday at the CEA LineShows conference in New York. “We've already purchased 700 million LED chips to use in our televisions,” and some Vizio TVs “use as much as 1,000 LED chips,” he said.

Throwing a lifeline to the struggling independent specialty retailer and custom integrator channels, Monster Cable announced a series of programs Wednesday at the CEA LineShows conference in New York, including a partnership with the Home Entertainment Source buying group to “reinforce the independent specialist and custom installers.” The deal was inked last week, according to Noel Lee, “head monster,” who said the partnership covers all categories of accessories.

LG’s model 42LW6600 TV is the first to pass compliance testing for the Digital Interactive Interface for Video & Audio (DiiVA), the DiiVA Consortium announced Monday. According to the consortium, momentum for DiiVA is expected to accelerate now that “a global manufacturer of LG’s stature has committed to incorporating DiiVA as a key ingredient for smart TVs.”

Following a federal judge’s rejection in May of Crestron’s motion to dismiss an antitrust lawsuit brought against the company by Savant Systems last fall, Crestron filed counterclaims Friday in the U.S. District Court in Boston. In the counterclaims, Crestron charges Savant with “tortious interference with contract, tortious interference with prospective business relationship, and unfair and deceptive trade practices.”

By 2015, the average Apple household will own a minimum of four iOS devices, not counting products not yet introduced, said Keith Nissen, research director at In-Stat. He was commenting on a recent report In-Stat released on the digital content world. “Google will not be far behind,” he told us, adding the caveat that Android’s long-term growth could be stunted “if they cannot expand into the video market.”

Strategy Analytics forecasts “widespread” in-vehicle Internet radio availability in its “Internet Radio in the Car: Audio Choices Expanding” report released Wednesday, but said consumer interest remains weak. The market for in-vehicle Internet radio solutions will grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 36 percent from 3.9 million vehicles in 2011 to 45.7 million by 2018, analyst John Canali told Consumer Electronics Daily. “While there is a strong push by industry players to promote in-vehicle Internet radio, the consumer demand for Internet radio remains quite low,” he said.

Citing “better than planned” sales, Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn said in its Q1 2012 earnings call Tuesday the company’s “connected world vision” is paying off. Total domestic connections grew 20 percent for the quarter, which Dunn attributed to momentum of Best Buy Mobile and the “rapid growth of connections” in its TV and computer business. Growth in tablet sales, led by the iPad 2, was the biggest catalyst for improved mobile computing numbers, while notebook PCs edged up over “steeper declines” the category suffered in the second half of fiscal 2011, Dunn said. Still early in the tablet age, Best Buy has “been able to sell virtually everything that we are getting as this category continues to generate excitement,” said Mike Vitelli, president, Americas.

Following a “challenging year” in 2010 when total worldwide unit shipments of set-top boxes declined 7 percent, the negative trend will continue in 2011, according to an In-Stat study. Worldwide shipments of set-top boxes totaled 195 million in 2010 and are forecast to dip again this year to 190.4 million, analyst Michael Paxton told us. Total set-top box revenues in 2010 were $20.5 billion and are projected to slip to $19.4 billion this year, he said. The trend is expected to reverse in the next few years, though, with shipments forecast to hit 210 million units by 2015, Paxton said. Digital set-top boxes, “key pieces of equipment for pay-TV service providers,” will fuel the reversal as providers upgrade older boxes to HDTV, PVR and PVR-with-broadband versions, Paxton said. In 2010, digital set top box revenue was higher than the combined revenue of video game consoles and Blu-ray players, he said. Europe is expected to account for more than half of worldwide unit shipments of Digital Terrestrial TV set-top boxes through 2011, In-Stat said. Demand for digital set-top boxes in the U.S. has been decreasing slightly -- by 3 percent in 2010 -- since late 2009 and is expected to continue the decline this year. Pay TV market saturation and the end of the analog-to-digital terrestrial broadcast transition has reduced demand for digital set-top boxes in the U.S., In-Stat said. Demand is projected to remain flat to down for the next three years, it said.

Samsung’s Series 5 Chromebook costs $334.32 to produce, IHS iSuppli said Monday, based on a stripping of the product by IHS’s Teardown Analysis Service. Total bill of materials for the device, which packs a 12.1-inch display, 8.5-hour battery pack, dual-core Atom processor, two gigabytes memory and a 16-gigabyte solid-state hard drive, is $322.12. Manufacturing cost of the China-sourced device is $12.20, IHS said. Bill of materials doesn’t take into account manufacturing software, licensing, or royalties, IHS said.