Rebecca Day

Technicolor will demonstrate at CES an app for “all handheld devices” that will extend the functionality of the BD-Live feature on Blu-ray discs, Bob Michaels, vice president of worldwide DVD for Technicolor’s Digital Content Delivery group, told Consumer Electronics Daily. Called Media Echo, the app will “align itself to what society is starting to evolve to,” Michaels said, “especially with the invention of the iPad.” He compared the feature set of the “second-screen” app to fantasy football apps that enable viewers to follow stats on players while they're watching a live game. Media Echo will wrap details including actor bios and interactive games around a feature film, he said.

ORLANDO, Fla. -- 3D TVs with passive 3D glasses and the evolution of standards will mark 3D TV’s sophomore year, said executives from content creation company 3ality we spoke with at the 3D Vendor Testing Event at ESPN Wide World of Sports. “You'll start to see some consumer-priced passive models at CES” or “soon after,” said Steve Schklair, CEO of 3ality Digital Systems. And in contrast to previous conventional wisdom that passive 3D technology is inferior in performance and more expensive to produce, Schklair said, new technologies have overcome previous issues. “I've seen them, they look great, and they only add pennies to the manufacturing cost,” he said. He said the industry keeps talking about a standard for 3D active glasses, but “the easiest way to create a standard is to get rid of the process altogether."

LOS ANGELES -- IMS Research, which hosted the Television 3.0 conference this week, predicts that by 2014 40 percent of U.S. households will have a 3D TV and worldwide penetration will be nine percent. To get there, though, someone will have to find a way to make 3D TV pay off, it said.

CENTURY CITY, Calif. -- Giving what he called a 3D “reality check,” David Poltrack, president of the CBS Vision research arm, thinks consumers have a “wait-and-see approach” toward 3D and are willing to endure “delayed gratification” to experience 3D at home, he told the Television 3.0 conference in a keynote Tuesday. It could be two, three or four years before consumers buy 3D TV, he said, due largely to “increased knowledge about how products come to market.”

RadioShack is using a $50 discount on the 3G iPhone to lure customers into the store through Saturday. This is “the only discount we're aware of on the iPhone,” said Daniel Liberman, senior vice president of mobility for RadioShack. The company’s use of the wildly popular iPhone to raise awareness of “the extent of our wireless offerings” is a novel marketing strategy, he said.

Despite interest from distributors in the U.S. and around the world, 3D’s future “is hard to tell,” David Zaslav, CEO of Discovery Communications, said at the UBS conference in New York Monday. “It’s very expensive,” he said, adding that Discovery chose to work with Sony and Imax to minimize the costs of developing a 3D channel and to share information along the learning curve.

Energy management solutions and expanded audio and video features for webcams are new areas that Schlage will focus on for its Z-Wave-based home management system in 2011, Dwight Gibson, general manager for the company’s Connected Home Solutions group, told us in a pre-CES briefing last week. Schlage’s 2011 product plan includes energy monitoring and management, he said. The company wants to give consumers the ability to see their “complete energy profile,” Gibson said, so they can better control those costs. Lighting, appliances and HVAC systems drive more than 80 percent of energy consumption in homes, “and that’s where consumers’ actions can make a meaningful difference,” he said.

Electronic Arts is driving toward $750 million annual revenue from digital business, Eric Brown, chief financial officer, said during a webcast from the Credit Suisse Technology Conference in Scottsdale, Ariz. The company generated $430 million from digital content in fiscal 2009 and that grew to $570 million in fiscal 2010, driven largely by downloads for extra content including micro-transactions for free-to-play games, social network games from Playfish, and map packs for Xbox 360 and PS3 video game players, Brown said. Full-game downloads have also been a key driver for the company’s revenues for fiscal first half 2011, which ended Sept. 30, he said.

PC peripheral maker Logitech is looking at the tablet PC market as an opportunity, not a threat, chief financial officer Erik Bardman said Wednesday in a session webcast from the Credit Suisse 2010 Technology Conference in Scottsdale, Ariz. While Logitech’s bread-and-butter mouse and keyboard business is “still growing,” Bardman forecast that it will “grow a little slower” over the next five years with growth dropping to 10 percent. “If people do replace laptops with tablets,” he said, “there’s a productivity element there, and we're very good with productivity input.”

Reversing a trend, the number of Google searches for Black Friday deals did not hit new highs Thanksgiving week -- but they did increase the week before and early this week, according to a report delivered via webcast by CEA research director Shawn DuBravac.