Rebecca Day

SAN DIEGO -- The TV industry has gotten into a “precarious position,” and is facing “interesting challenges heading into the next decade,” said Paul Gagnon, director of North America TV Research for DisplaySearch at the Flat Panel Display Conference last week. Consumers have gotten used to “rapid declines” in flat-panel TV prices and manufacturers have offset the price declines by launching new features and introducing larger screen sizes to “to keep price erosion at bay,” he said. But the prospects for “revolutionary transitions” such as those to HD or from CRT to flat-panel TVs are “weaker,” he said, and manufacturers and retailers will have to lure customers back through more evolutionary features.

SAN DIEGO -- Facing pressure from low-priced passive 3D TVs and inexpensive polarized glasses from LG and Vizio, Panasonic will introduce sub-$100 active-shutter glasses this year, Jim Sanduski, senior vice president of sales at Panasonic, told us after a TV panel at the DisplaySearch Flat Panel Display Conference Wednesday.

SAN DIEGO -- Describing his keynote at the DisplaySearch Flat-Panel Display Conference Wednesday as “fairly downbeat,” Goldman Sachs Managing Director Matthew Fassler said the future of CE retailing is “not an easy one.” Two walls are closing in on traditional CE retailers, Fassler said. Wal-Mart on one side is pressing for market share and is capitalizing on falling flat-panel TV prices that have entered “their price zone.” And Amazon, he said, “is working to capture market share at the high end.” The combination is creating “long-run pressure” on CE retailers reflected in plummeting stock prices, he said.

SAN DIEGO -- Despite continued power reductions in flat-panel TVs, TVs remain by far the biggest electricity hog in the average home, Tracy Peacock, 3M’s global marketing manager, told DisplaySearch’s Flat-Panel Display Conference Tuesday. Watt usage for the average 32-inch LCD TV has dropped to 45 today from more than 200 watts four years ago, Peacock said, and Energy Star standards have accelerated ahead of pace since they were first introduced in the fall of 2008. She noted that Energy Star 5.3 goes live in September and Energy Star 6.0 specs will be published in November.

SAN DIEGO -- Changes in competition from technology advances, developing markets and maturing of existing markets are changing the landscape of the global flat-panel display industry, speakers at DisplaySearch’s Flat-Panel Display Conference said Tuesday. Future growth will shift to emerging markets “with different needs and characteristics,” said Paul Semenza, senior vice president of analyst services for DisplaySearch, leading to challenges for the supply chain.

3D glasses manufacturer Marchon is preparing for the spate of passive 3D TVs due on the market this year with a multi-pronged distribution strategy that includes CE retail stores, optical outlets and an e-commerce site due to launch within the next 60 days, David Johnson, president of Marchon’s 3D group, told Consumer Electronics Daily. The company is also exploring selling glasses to theater-goers at cinemas, Johnson said, and is testing the concept at select theaters.

Ten years after the launch of the Rhapsody digital music service, the music industry is scrambling to keep up with changing technology and to find a successor to the packaged media revenue model at a time when consumers have more access to music than ever, much of it free. “The subscription is a confusing message,” conceded Brian McGarvey, vice president of Business Development at Rhapsody, speaking on a panel on The Next Wave of Connected Devices at Digital Music Forum East in Manhattan last week. “Device makers make it hard and discoverability has been tough,” he said.

"CDs are dead,” Ted Cohen, managing partner at TAG Strategic, said Thursday at the Digital Music Forum East in Manhattan. “There’s no reason to own music anymore, when there are so many ways to access it” free and through online subscriptions, he said.

A conference call with journalists Wednesday did little to illuminate Russound’s about-face with the Colorado vNet brand. A leak from a dealer to an industry magazine for integrators last week revealed the company’s plans to resuscitate the Colorado vNet home control product line. The company announced in December it had decided to “discontinue shipping the Colorado vNet product line and wind down sales operations” (CED Dec 29 p1). At the time, Charlie Porritt, CEO of parent company Russound, said the company would reassess Colorado vNet product “as it relates to the evolving custom install market and focus on R&D for the future."

In the wake of Borders’ Chapter 11 filing last week, Barnes & Noble has suspended its dividend of 25 cents a share to pad its cash flow with $60 million and give the company “flexibility” to make quick investment decisions “as opportunities arise,” the company said in its fiscal Q3 2011 earnings webcast Tuesday. CEO William Lynch noted that Barnes & Noble had predicted “consolidation in the market” in brick-and-mortar stores and said the company doesn’t plan to shut stores besides the “nominal number” it previously announced. He said “a minority” of Borders’ 200 locations “appear attractive to us.”