Rebecca Day

ST. LOUIS -- “Forty points ain’t enough,” HTSA Executive Director Richard Glikes told vendors Wednesday at the fall meeting of the Home Technology Specialists Association. The comment followed a detailed presentation by HTSA member Bob Gullo, president of Electronics Design Group, Piscataway, N.J., on the design, labor and subcontractor costs involved in large-scale custom home-electronics projects. “Our vendor partners need to be educated,” Glikes said, “because some of you sell us projectors but you may not know what goes on beyond that.” He said manufacturers understand their own product categories “but may not know the depth of what we do."

LCD TV unit sales in North America fell 3 percent year-over-year in first half 2010 due to economic pressure from high unemployment and the slow housing market, according to the DisplaySearch Quarterly Advanced Global TV Shipment and Forecast Report. Paul Gagnon, director of North America TV Research at DisplaySearch, said continued economic pressure combined with a “sharp slowdown” in price erosion have “pushed consumers to the sidelines” as they wait for the economy to improve or prices to drop.

ST. LOUIS -- “Revivify” is the theme of this fall’s Home Technology Specialists Association meeting as specialty audio/video dealers -- hit hard by the economy, changing technology and a fading customer base -- seek to energize their business with new products and fresh approaches. In his opening remarks to dealer and vendor members, Executive Director Richard Glikes outlined changes that have taken place in the customer base and retail landscape that have reshaped how specialty dealers have to adapt to survive.

The remote monitoring market for custom integrators is gaining traction, according to companies like Panamax/Furman, Nuage Nine and ihiji, which are hoping to build a high-margin service category for integrators increasingly slammed by product discounting. At CEDIA, ihiji, which began its monitoring product in March, unveiled a two-way service said to provide real-time remote systems restart, reboot and repair, and the company expects the market for IP-based remote monitoring to break open in 2011. “There are enough devices out there now that are intelligent and more are coming online every day,” President Stuart Rench told Consumer Electronics Daily.

The Z-Wave Alliance will host a summit in Chiba, Japan, this week, as part of an effort to expand into the Japanese market at CEATEC, Marketing Director Mary Miller told Consumer Electronics Daily. The move into Japan follows an announcement by the alliance at CEDIA last month that it had certified its 400th product, the Vera gateway from Mi Casa Verde. Certification ensures that products bearing the Z-Wave logo “will work with every other one” in a connected home and will remain compatible with future products, she said.

When ESPN 3D televises its fifth college football game Saturday, it will be using a custom rig built by camera equipment company Chapman Leonard that places a robotic 3D camera on the first-down marker cart to give viewers a 25-foot-high perspective from the sidelines. Phil Orlins, coordinating producer of ESPN 3D, called the custom rig “the first major enhancement” in 3D coverage for the network in a constantly evolving effort to balance the “impactful visual experience” with “solid documentation” of a sports event. The camera moving along the line of scrimmage is high enough for an overview shot similar to the view from the press box, but with the proximity required for compelling 3D, Orlins told Consumer Electronics Daily in an interview Wednesday.

Bose unveiled its first video product Tuesday, a $5,349 46-inch, 120Hz, 1080p LCD TV with an integrated multi-speaker audio system, outboard console switcher and a game-changing remote control. All sound comes from the screen, with no subwoofer, and the system was designed to create “spaciousness, to reproduce low notes” and to “transport listeners to another place just by using sound,” according to Santiago Carvajal, business director for Bose video products.

ATLANTA -- While audio and video companies talked at CEDIA last week about adjusting to a changing market and next-gen consumers, home automation company Control4 had its sights firmly on the future. Lower revenue, slim margins and the continued malaise in home construction continue to weigh down dealers and manufacturers, but Control4 has remained in “a bubble” separated from the struggles of the overall custom electronics market, CEO Will West told Consumer Electronics Daily. “We've been growing and adding market share,” he said.

ATLANTA -- With the audio/video receiver fighting for relevance amid a growing market for powered speaker systems and streaming media devices, Denon is holding fast to the AVR as the “hub” of the entertainment experience while trying to keep its custom models ahead of the curve with Internet streaming, networking and control features. At CEDIA, Denon announced it was the first receiver company to incorporate Apple’s AirPlay wireless streaming technology, which lets users access all content from their iTunes library -- including DRM-protected content -- as well as album art.

Sony provided details of its first ES projector Thursday at the press launch of the 3D VPL-VW90ES at CEDIA Expo in Atlanta (CED Sept 22 p1). The VPL-VW90ES ($9,999), due in stores in November, uses a single 200-watt UHP lamp, comes with a multi-element zoom lens and integrates with third-party control systems from AMX, Crestron, Elan, Control4, Savant, Vantage, RTI and URC, said Neal Manowitz, director of home audio/video for Sony. Incorporating 2D to 3D conversion, the SXRD projector comes with two pairs of infrared 3D active-shutter glasses, which communicate with an IR transmitter built into the chassis. The 1080p projector incorporates the latest 3G LCoS panel technology, Manowitz said, including reduced pixel spacing, from 25mm to 20mm, and lower noise, 20 dB, down from 22 dB. The projector uses three, 0.61-inch panels and is driven by a custom Sony-grown ASIC that handles the video processing, according to Chris Fawcett, vice president of TVs for Sony. The brightness of the projector was given as 1,000 lumens with dynamic contrast ratio of 85,000:1. Limited warranty is three years, compared with two years for general distribution projectors, Manowitz said, and distribution is limited to the specialty channel and custom installers as part of Sony’s renewed commitment to the custom channel.