Smart-watch makers are trying to find the right combination of design, functionality, interface, and price that will galvanize a customer population that is curious, but not yet motivated to open their wallets in large numbers. Probably the best-selling smart watch is Samsung's first-generation Galaxy Gear, which Samsung says sold about a million units through the [...]
Yesterday, Samsung held its annual home entertainment press event to show off its 2014 line of televisions. Not surprisingly, the emphasis was on curved screens, so Samsung chose an appropriate venue for the event – the striking, spiraling Guggenheim Museum on 88th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York. At the International CES a few [...]
Aereo's service problems in New York City during the recent Oscars telecast could mean they've engineered themselves into a corner.
A lot of the display-related excitement at January's CES 2014 related to 4K, multi-touch panels, and gesture-related system control. A month later, and those same technologies were being featured in digital signage at the Digital Signage Expo (DSE), also in Las Vegas. It's impressive how quickly 4K migrated from television to signage. LG's 105-inch Ultra [...]
After the close of Digital Signage Expo, my colleague Steve Sechrist and I had a dinner of expensive (but excellent) Las Vegas hamburgers and talked as we wandered around the Forum Shops. We wound up at the Sony Store, nearly deserted late on a Thursday evening in early February. We had leisurely conversations with the [...]
I’m writing this while sitting in the third day of the annual Hollywood Post Alliance Technology Retreat, which is one of the top technology conferences anywhere and which attracted well over 500 attendees this year to the Hyatt Indian Wells Resort in the Palm Springs area. I’ve been attending the Retreat since 2002, and it [...]
On February 8, in his presentation entitled “Are Quantum Dots Closing the Window of Opportunity for OLED-TV?” at the SID Los Angeles Chapter’s One-Day Conference on Technologies for Advanced Television, held in Costa Mesa, CA, Seth Coe-Sullivan, co-founder and CTO of QD Vision, made a well-argued case that OLED-TV would become irrelevant in five years. [...]
During winter storms, the terrestrial “one serving many digital TV broadcast model continues to chug along reliably, providing timely news and weather updates and helping us feel like we’re not cut off from the rest of the world.
Let's not talk about director Michael Bay's meltdown at Samsung's huge CES press event. Okay, let's, but just for a moment. Bay, a featured guest (presumably because his explosion-filled action films look really good on Samsung large-screen TVs) came down with a severe case of stage fright when the teleprompter stopped showing him the words [...]
According to a news report, Samsung dominated the global television business in 2013. Business as usual?
It has become conventional wisdom that the two major quantum-dot display-enhancement approaches — the flattened glass cylinder of QD Vision and the polymer sheet of Nanosys/3M — have there own natural market segments, and this conventional wisdom has been supported by statements from the two camps. QD Vision's “Color IQ” glass element, which is incorporated [...]
RCA, the iconic company that — more than any other — brought color television to the consumer mass market was dissolved years ago. But its brand has survived and sometimes prospered. The brand is owned and licensed by Technicolor. After some mis-steps in years past, Technicolor is now managing the brand in an intelligent and [...]
Some of my fellow analysts have been bemoaning a lack of TV, tablet, and cell-phone innovations at CES 2014. Well, either I have lower standards than my colleagues or a keener eye because I saw quite a few things that surprised, delighted, and horrified me. Here are some of them. 3M's Quantum Dot Enhancement Film [...]
It’s been almost two weeks since CES. The booths and signs have long been taken down; the long lines and long hours are a distant memory. Time for a thoughtful retrospective on the show…
At Sharp’s pre-CES press conference, held at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas on the morning of January 6, Sharp announced a television technology that John Harrington, president of the Sharp Marketing Company of America, called a “game changer. Unlike many of the products announced at CES, Quattron+ is a solution to a problem [...]
