3D Mystery Shopper

Monday November 29, 2010 – Stewart Wolpin

It was an otherwise innocuous press release: Display Search noted "3D TV Not Growing as Fast as TV Makers Expected in 2010," the company slightly cutting shipments projections from 3.4 million units in the U.S. this year to 3.2 million units. Not a shock; initial forecasts of a new technology often are overly optimistic, backers hoping to project an image of success to spur consumer interest and demand. Once the realities of the marketplace and the current recessed economy took their toll, a quiet (shhhh!) adjustment of said numbers out of the public eye shouldn't appear too damning.

Except, as is often the case, there's more to these lower-than-expected uptake numbers than meets the eye. If 3D HDTV fails to catch on, the manufacturers – specifically the retail merchandising managers and trainers, along with the retailers themselves – will have a lot to answer for, at least if my recent 3D mystery shopper trip last week is typical.

Ostensibly, I went out to three Best Buy locations in midtown Manhattan – the store on Fifth Avenue and 44th Street, 23d Street and Sixth Avenue, and in Union Square where Panasonic made a big splash with the first-ever 3D intro last March – to test out the new universal 3D glasses from XpanD, which went on sale last week. XpanD's universal glasses would give me the excuse to devote this column to the quest to unify the nascent 3D equipment experience, including the efforts of CEA's own universal glasses committee. Attaining a one-standard-glasses-for-all, everyone agrees, would immeasurably ease consumer confusion. The Magnolia stores inside Best Buy, both myself and XpanD figured, would be the perfect place to test their glasses on a variety of 3D HDTV makes and models and, at the same time, take the temperature of the 3D market.

A raging fever doesn't begin to describe the problems in 3D HDTV.

Only one 3D HDTV in each store I visited actually was playing 3D content, all Panasonic sets, each matched four feet away with glasses mounted on height-adjustable stanchions. At the Fifth Avenue store, there was a 3D Samsung LED HDTV showing not a 3D demo, but ESPN's SportsCenter because, one employee working in a nearby department told me, they wanted to keep track of scores and news. I loitered around the Magnolia store-within-a-store for 15 minutes, fruitlessly waiting for someone to notice a customer interested in the high-priced item. During my wait, several customers wandered over and Pavlovianly (if that's a word) donned the 3D glasses tethered to the table opposite the Samsung. I advised each one that the set was not showing 3D (how they didn't notice this themselves I can't begin to understand), and to try the nearby Panasonic – which they attempted to do using the Samsung glasses. I let them know that wouldn't work either, that they'd have to use the glasses mounted on the stanchion in front of the Panasonic – and that's not the punch line. (One fellow thought I worked there; he was disappointed when I told him I didn't.)

When I finally beckoned a sales associate and asked her to show me a 3D demo on the Samsung, she acted as if I'd asked her to do my laundry. She then took five minutes to find the remote and run through the TV's menus until successfully locating the right input settings. It was then we discovered one set of the tethered glasses was missing the power button and the other pair had no power at all. She shrugged her shoulders and wandered off, offering no solution, a potential 3D customer lost. I, of course, whipped out my XpanD universal glasses and fulfilled my original mission.

My experience at the other two Best Buys were actually worse. Along with single working Panasonic demos, both also had single Samsung and Sony 3D sets – neither displaying a 3D demo, neither with glasses anywhere in sight. Only the price tag indicated the set's status as 3D. And a second Panasonic set in the Union Square store was showing 3D – but there were no glasses mounted in the stanchion. And as in the Fifth Avenue store, I wandered around the 3D TVs in the other two stores for around 15 minutes each, with nary a sales representative in sight.

I'm shocked any 3D sets are actually bought except by those who know exactly what they want and who don't need a demo, or they are buying a high-end set for other reasons than its 3D credentials. Yes, other stores sell 3D HDTVs, both other big box retailers such as Sears as well as high-end boutiques. But Best Buy, as the biggest nationwide electronics big box retailers, is the 3D front line, and, if my three-store-tour is an actual trend (and I suspect it is), the center of that front line is buckling like the Atlantic Wall on D-Day – not from overwhelming force, but from complete neglect.*

Perhaps the (finally!) release of Avatar in 3D on Dec. 1 will improve matters, but if there are no glasses on sets other than Panasonics, hardly anyone will see it.

Oh, the XpanD glasses proved superior to Panasonic's RealD-made lenses, offering brighter colors, deeper contrast and blacks, and more 3D depth. But suddenly this seems way beside the point.

*Editor’s Note: We happened to do our own Best Buy 3DTV shopping in Dallas (only one store) two weeks ago with similar results. 3D content was being displayed on a new set and there were glasses present but they didn’t work, which probably means the batteries were drained.

I've Seen Cloud Storage from Both Sides Now

Monday November 22, 2010 – Stewart Wolpin

Joni Mitchell is going to have amend her lyrics for "Both Sides Now", adding a positive digital spin to her cynical description of clouds as mere sun blockers, indiscriminant precipitation sources and activity inhibitors.

Prior to Apple's announcement last week of The Beatles invading iTunes, most initial speculation focused on Apple unveiling a cloud iTunes service. There is likely a lot of crow being eaten by the varying prognosticating pundits, but analysts' red-faces may be only temporary.

Cloud storage is a inexorable inevitability, both for personal storage as well as for content streaming. Picasa, Flickr and their ilk already are popular repositories for our photos, while services such as Carbonite and SugarSync already are popular cloud-based U-Store-It warehouses for our data. And Cablevision got Supreme Court permission to begin network DVR service to store our recorded programs on their enormous cloud rather than our own finite home DVRs.

On the other side of the virtual sky are content cloud services. We pull TV and movie programming from the cloud via iTunes, Hulu, YouTube, Vudu, Netflix, et al. Music is streamed from cloud sources such as Pandora, Napster and Rhapsody. And as far as Apple's anticipated cloud-based iTunes service is concerned, the company is nearly ready to open a 500,000-square-foot data center in North Carolina. Even though the company hasn't discussed what the massive facility is for, speculation is rampant it will be used for cloud-based content delivery or an expansion its MobileMe cloud storage service.

The cloud won't only be used for pure storage. Earlier this week, AT&T demonstrated some startling cloud-based TV technology, including a one called iMiracle which would let you make contextual searches of cloud recorded material – searching for specific spoken phrases within a recorded program – and multi-variable voice searches of future TV programming (i.e. "comedy movies starring Woody Allen this Saturday and Sunday").

Since cloud-based storage for all our digital goods is not an if but a when, the only question is how soon local storage products such as DVRs and multi-terabyte external hard drives become both unnecessary and obsolete.

Examining how fast we moved from one form of storage to the next over the last 30 years to guestimate how quickly we move from local to sky storage won't be instructive, however.

Until now, the shift has always been simply physical media, and always to increase capacity – from the 8-inch floppy to the 3.5-inch micro floppy to the Zip drive to CD-R +/- to DVD-R +/- to solid state flash memory cards and thumb drives to portable hard drives, and the varying Moore's Law growth in hard drive memory capacity from kilobytes to megabytes to terabytes and, soon, to petabytes.

But Joni isn't the only one who really doesn't know much about clouds at all.

There's a psychological aspect to cloud storage mainstream consumers have to overcome. Not to get all metaphysical, but physical forms of media are like human consciousness – whatever we know or are is essentially trapped inside ourselves. Transferring that knowledge or experience to other folks – to transfer data from one device to another (i.e. a recorded program on a DVR or an Excel spreadsheet on your PC to a smartphone for mobile viewing/manipulation) – is an imperfect process. Just as humans deal with imperfect language, gestures and facial expressions to messily transfer knowledge or experience, in the data universe we have to deal with copy protection and formats and various wired or wireless connections, etc.

Cloud storage, however, is more akin to Star Trek's Borg, a collected consciousness. In this metaphysical context, all your devices – and anyone you designate – can easily share the same data/content because the data doesn't exist in a physical form in the cloud, at least not a physical form we can see or touch. As far as we're concerned, the photos from your last vacation are floating magically in the ether someplace, free to be viewed by us or anyone we designate on any device with access to the Internet.

And more and faster Internet access – Super WiFi or 4G cellphone networks offering data download speeds of up to 60 Mbps – will contribute to the lure of the cloud.

Therein lies the reason cloud storage will only slowly become widely adopted as a local storage replacement. Local media may be limited in capacity and not as portable as we'd like, but cloud storage seems a bit too much like alchemy – it's there, but isn't. I save my vacation photos and they go – where? Are they safe? Can someone else get at them and steal them? With a nod to Laurence Olivier's demented dentist in Marathon Man, is it safe?

So while the move to cloud storage is happening, it's happening slowly, almost too slowly to notice without time-lapse reporting. Cloud storage is a concept the mainstream consumer has yet to fully grok, which likely will keep sales of DVRs and external hard drives relatively safe – for a while.

Oh, I pulled Joni Mitchell's performance of "Both Sides Now" from – you got it – the cloud.

MPEG-4 AVC Readies Old-School Products for a Second Close up

Monday November 15, 2010 – Myra Moore

Mobile video phones are the star players in DTC’s forecast of more than 1 billion MPEG-4 AVC products estimated to ship into the marketplace in 2010. But the standard is also doing its fair share to brush up the sales of more traditional consumer electronics products as consumer appetite for HD increases.

Advanced video compression merely makes the fact of video playback possible on mobile phones because of the ability to squeeze more bits into a small and error-prone pipe. But for Blu ray Disc (BD) devices, camcorders, and digital still cameras (DSCs) it allows for a relatively efficient and low-cost way to deliver high-definition content to devices other than HD set-top boxes and TVs.

An analysis of forecasts for traditional consumer electronics products using the MPEG-4 AVC standard reveals a high level of growth not seen in some years for more established digital consumer electronics products such as camcorders, DSCs and IDTVs that only previously operated with MPEG-2 or other video compression technologies such as Motion JPEG and MPEG-4 Visual.

In the case of camcorders and DSCs and other common digital products, consumers have come to expect HD. In the case of IDTVs, the betting is that many consumers will grow to expect the ability to source some programming from websites and much of that programming requires MPEG-4 AVC decoding. TVs, camcorders and cameras may not be the glamorous stars that are the video-rich smart phones, but they’re getting a second close up thanks to the MPEG-4 HD face lift.

For a more in-depth data on the use of the MPEG-4 AVC codec, DTC’s latest MPEG-4 AVC reports are now available. Follow the link for more information and detailed tables of content.

I Want My Internet on My TV

Monday November 8, 2010 – Shelby Cunningham

There is a boom in digital content appliances (DCAs) – set-top boxes that deliver Web-based video to the TV -- sales, but it’s unlikely that the new devices have as much life as discreet products. DCA’s won’t die due to lack of consumer interest, but because of convergence.

Many consumers want the function, they just don’t want to stack yet one more box on their TVs. Lower-priced and better designed DCAs like the new Apple TV may be more attractive than the first iteration of DCAs, but the web-streaming function will likely follow that of Tivo and Sling functions – set up housekeeping in a centralized receiver.

The transformation has already begun with service/function providers like Vudu being snapped up by bigger companies like Walmart. Walmart finally gave us a hint of how it will use Vudu last week when it announced that when you buy the special edition of Toy Story 3 at Walmart you will also receive a free streaming copy of the movie on Vudu.

But why would TV makers and service providers want to include access to these Internet video services in their subscriptions? Because of competition and demand. Service providers have to make it easy for people to access Internet content through their TVs or they might switch to a different provider. Services such as Hulu, Vudu and Netflix are already easily accessible on a number of TVs, Blu-ray players and STBs.

There are other boxes, such as the Roku box, that show no signs of converging right now. But it’s only a matter of time before consumers stop buying them because their home entertainment equipment and service providers have made it easy to watch Netflix, Hulu, Amazon.com and many other Internet video services. The Internet video service providers/box suppliers that get acquired or secure a relationship with a company already delivering TV and video services to consumers are the ones who will last in the long run.

Source: DTC

Power Hungry eBook Readers Could Drain Bookworms

Monday November 1, 2010 – Stewart Wolpin

We'd like to welcome a new member to the MPEG-4 family of products – the NOOKcolor. Introduced Tuesday night amidst angelic swirling dervishes at Barnes & Noble's Manhattan Union Square store, this first LCD color ebook reader plays MPEG-4 videos of all stripes both from its Android Web surfer and inside ePub-formatted books and magazines.

Whether or not other ebook reader makers, most prominently Amazon, follow with their own color LCD ebook readers with MPEG-4 video playback capabilities remains to be seen. But NOOKcolor faces two other major challenges: battery life and price.

Make no mistake – NOOKcolor is a fabulous ebook reader, even if its menu-manic interface is a bit daunting. Text jumps off its bright 7-inch LCD screen, contrast and readability impossible to match by any gray monochrome e-ink-based ebook reader. Ebook illustrations, maps, diagrams and photos in their natural color condition are finally worth looking at compared to the powdery Etch-a-Sketch-like 16 layers of gray on the regular Nook and Kindle.

But Barnes & Noble has broken an unspoken agreement between ereader maker and readers.

When the Kindle first came out, book lovers cocked a cynical eyebrow and asked, "Why do we need an electronic book when the real thing never runs out of power?"

In order to allay reader battery-dead-book dread, Amazon used low-voltage electronic ink, enabling Kindle's and other e-ink ebook battery life to be measured in weeks. With battery life a non-issue, Kindle sales took off – Amazon announced not so coincidentally a day before Barnes & Noble's NOOKcolor event that only a month into Q4, Kindle sales already have surpassed last year's Q4 Kindle sales and was selling more ebooks than physical books. Occasional battery recharging has been a perfectly acceptable tradeoff for being able to carry around and access a library of literacy in a less-than-a-pound gadget.

NOOKcolor, however, has eschewed e-ink technology for a full blown color LCD screen, ending up with just an eight-hour reading battery life. By comparison, iPad, with its 9.7-inch screen, can play far more processor demanding video files for 10 hours. And you have to figure WiFi Web surfing will drain NOOKcolor's cell even faster.

With its compromised power life, B&N has re-introduced the original ebook objection – battery worry. Will you be able to read the last few chapters of that John Grisham page-turner before your NOOKcolor dies? That circumstance may prove even more dramatic than the book's plot.

But NOOKcolor is more than an ebook reader. With its Android 2.0 OS, WiFi Web surfing and MPEG-4 video and MP3/AAC music playback capabilities, NOOKcolor has pretenses to be a tablet, which raises a value proposition issue with real tablets.

iPad obviously does nearly everything NOOKcolor does merely lifting its little finger (if an iPad had appendages, a pretty creepy thought) including bright, big(ger) screen LCD ebooking, plus around 300,000 additional leisure and productivity activities, and yet is "only" twice the price as a NOOKcolor ($499 for the 16 GB WiFi iPad; $249 for the 8 GB WiFi NOOKcolor).

Forcing consumers to face both the crippled battery life and the convoluted iPad/NOOKcolor value proposition may keep Amazon and other ebook makers from venturing where B&N has chosen to tread, at least until they see how NOOKcolor does in the market.