The supply of LCD and DLP components for some front projectors may tighten following Epson and Texas Instruments suspending production at plants in Japan damaged by Friday’s record quake, those suppliers said Tuesday.

NCTA hired Michael Powell as president and CEO, the cable association confirmed Tuesday. That ended several months of speculation that the former Republican chairman of the FCC would get the top job at NCTA. Kyle McSlarrow is vacating that position at month’s end to work for Comcast. Powell will leave Providence Equity Partners, where he’s a senior adviser, to start at NCTA on April 25. He'll have his hands full trying to keep cable operators and programmers, including Comcast, in harmony on issues proving somewhat divisive, industry officials said. Those issues include net neutrality and retransmission consent deals, cable executives have said.

Electronic Arts and THQ, each with a small presence in Japan, suffered little harm from Friday’s quake and tsunami, their executives said Tuesday at the Lazard Capital Markets conference in Boston.

Receiver performance standards will become an increasingly significant issue as the FCC looks at how to make more efficient use of the spectrum, unless industry steps forward to make receivers work better, former FCC and NTIA official Dale Hatfield said Tuesday at the Catholic University of America’s communications symposium. Office of Engineering and Technology Chief Julius Knapp said the FCC continues to look closely at questions about receiver performance.

TORONTO -- The two largest cable operators, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, appear to be taking somewhat divergent paths on an ambitious next-generation architecture for the cable industry, frustrating the original goals of network designers, aggravating equipment vendors, and potentially driving up equipment production costs, officials said at the SCTE Canadian Summit.

Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on how many iPad 2s it shipped or sold since the device’s Friday launch, or the estimate by research company IHS iSuppli that the 32-GB version of the new device has a bill of materials (BOM) cost of $326.60. Analysts projected that as many as 1 million iPad 2s were sold at launch and many stores reportedly sold out of the device over the weekend.

Rolling, controlled blackouts appeared Monday to be complicating recovery efforts of Japanese firms trying to assess the damage from Friday’s killer quake and tsunami (CED March 14 p1), said statements from several companies. Still, many said they voluntarily had shut facilities, even those undamaged in the disaster, to cope with ongoing power shortages. All said they're still uncertain what impact the disaster might have on financial performance for the quarter ending March 31, which for most Japanese firms close out their fiscal years.

Comcast ended funding for a TiVo engineering program that developed software for Comcast’s DVR platform, capping a nearly six-year run, TiVo said Monday in a 10-K filing at the SEC. But the companies are continuing discussions about “further development and deployment opportunities,” TiVo said. The funding pact expired Dec. 31.

Hours after Japan’s strongest quake on record struck at about 2:46 p.m. local time Friday, sparking massive tsunamis that inundated large portions of Fukushima and Miyagi prefectures, companies that operate factories in the region said they were still trying to assess the damage, our survey of those firms found. Though the first reports indicated casualties overall in Fukushima and Miyagi were expected to climb into the hundreds, CE firms we contacted said they were aware initially of only minor injuries to employees.

The FCC should delay an incentive auction of TV spectrum for at least a decade to give broadcasters time to start using a more efficient signal modulation standard, a midsize broadcaster’s CEO said Friday. Jim Goodmon of Capitol Broadcasting, known as a maverick for pushing technology and other changes before broadcasters do, told us he thinks that the industry can soon agree to use OFDM to replace the AVS-B standard used for digital broadcasts.