Qualcomm has tried to separate its patent lawsuit against Apple from its role as a chip supplier to that and other companies, CEO Steve Mollenkopf told a Citi investor conference Friday. “They're very separate teams that deal with this,” he said. “We think being a good supplier is important. It's important business to us and the shareholders, and we try to have the least amount of disruption. ... We want to be a partner of people for decades, so it can take a long view.” History shows “these things get settled out of court,” Mollenkopf said of the fight with Apple. "There's always discussions.” Apple didn’t comment Monday.
Disney decided to pull its Marvel and Lucasfilm studios' films from Netflix, CEO Bob Iger told an investor conference Thursday. This is so a coming Disney product, which will include other titles his company previously said it will no longer let the video streamer distribute after 2019 (see 1708090029), “will have the entire output of the studio” for the direct-to-consumer service, Iger said. Netflix emailed us Friday that "as with Disney films, US Netflix members will have access to Marvel and Star Wars films on the service through the end of 2019 and 2020 in many cases. This includes all new films shown theatrically through the end of 2018. We continue to do business with" Disney "on many fronts, including our ongoing relationship with Marvel TV." The two studios will produce four-five original films exclusively for the new service, “primarily live action,” plus four-five original TV series and three-four TV movies, all “Disney-branded,” Iger said. The Disney direct-to-consumer service will “launch big,” Iger said. It will launch internationally, and it’s “possible that some markets will launch the service earlier than we'll launch in the United States because of windowing opportunities that we have on the motion picture side that we don't have here,” he said. The ESPN-branded livestreaming app will launch in the spring with 10,000 “live sporting events” in the first year “that are not currently on ESPN's linear channels,” including Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, Major League Soccer and “a lot of college sports that we own the rights to,” the CEO said. “Over time,” Iger envisions the ESPN livestreaming app as becoming a “sports marketplace platform” that will emulate iTunes for its consumer-friendly utility: “You'll be able to pick and choose, over time, what it is you want. It won't necessarily be a one-size-fits-all.”
The registration period for the January CES opened Wednesday and for the first time requires attendees to furnish head shots that will be printed directly on the front of badges, amid other security steps added in past years. “It was something we needed to prep to do,” so that’s why the new procedure is being implemented for the first time, said Karen Chupka, CTA senior vice president-events and conferences. Registrants can link their CES applications to photos stored in their LinkedIn profiles, or they may upload JPEG files to complete their registrations, or they may snap their own head shots using the cameras on their laptops, through the app built into the registration website, she said.
There’s “lots more work to do” at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, “and I actually am not going anywhere,” said CEO Meg Whitman on a Tuesday earnings call when asked about her long-term commitment in light of her recent interest in the Uber CEO opening that ultimately went to Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi (see the personals section of the Sept. 1 issue of this publication). Whitman was “called in very late in the Uber search and I thought it was a very interesting business model,” she said. Uber is “actually quite similar to eBay in many ways” in that “it’s very disruptive,” she said. Uber “relies on a community of drivers just like eBay relies on a community of sellers,” and its “growth prospects reminded me of eBay in its early days,” said Whitman, who owns stock in the ride-hailing service. “In the end,” Whitman decided the Uber CEO job “wasn’t the right thing” for her, she said. HPE “is quite special in its own right and we have a very focused strategy and a path forward to build a very big business on what I think is a quite compelling strategy,” she said. “I have dedicated the last six years of my life to this company and there is more work to do and I am here to help make this company successful.”
The chief global spokesman for LG Electronics walked back pre-IFA remarks that the company stands a “big chance” of backing HDR10+ if the Fox, Panasonic and Samsung consortium that licenses HDR10+ next year as an open, royalty-free high dynamic range format shows the technology’s as good as Dolby Vision (see 1708310042). "It's too early to tell whether the HDR10+ format will become an industry standard or if it will be widely adopted by manufacturers or content providers,” LG spokesman Ken Hong emailed us Saturday. Hong told us he misunderstood our questions to be about the open HDR10 format, which LG already supports, not HDR10+, which rival Samsung developed and positioned as a competitive alternative to proprietary, royalty-bearing Dolby Vision technology. To create an HDR10+ “ecosystem,” Samsung “has been out there talking to everyone” about adopting the format, Bill Mandel, vice president-industry relations, at Samsung Research America, told Insight Media’s HDR10+ workshop Friday, also in Berlin. Samsung and its Fox and Panasonic partners “are really going to be doubling down,” he said. “We want to just invite everybody in to be adopters.”
EPA missed a self-imposed August deadline for releasing the finalized Energy Star V8.0 TV spec, and representatives didn’t comment. V8.0 takes effect April 16, said a July 18 cover memo accompanying release of the spec’s third and final draft. EPA’s overriding emphasis in V8.0 is on imposing requirements that assure the energy-saving automatic brightness control feature, which adjusts a set's screen brightness to suit ambient light conditions, won’t be deactivated even when a consumer switches the TV to different picture modes.
There’s a “big chance” Dolby Vision supporter LG Electronics will support Dolby's proprietary high dynamic range technology and HDR10+, the dynamic-metadata tone-mapping platform Fox, Panasonic and Samsung plan to start licensing as an open, royalty-free HDR format (see 1708300040), Ken Hong, LG’s chief global spokesman, told us Thursday at IFA in Berlin. “We do a lot of things that we really don’t communicate that much,” and Active HDR is one, he said. The “consensus” within LG on Active HDR is that “we have something, but is it significantly better than what's already out there, that is more likely to become an accepted standard?” Hong said when we asked if LG considered promoting Active HDR as an open industry standard for enhancing the static metadata of HDR10. “I don’t think the people who are responsible for Active HDR think it is.” That the HDR10+ platform will be licensed as royalty-free “is great, but it’s got to be good,” said Hong.
Monday’s announcement that Fox, Panasonic and Samsung will form a licensable certification and logo program built around Samsung’s HDR10+ dynamic-metadata high dynamic range platform (see 1708280018) was “definitely an attempt to give the industry an option for an open standard that could be further developed and one that’s royalty-free.” So said Danny Kaye, Fox Film Corp. executive vice president, when we asked him after Panasonic’s IFA news conference in Berlin Wednesday whether the HDR10+ licensing program was meant to give the industry an alternative to the proprietary, royalty-bearing Dolby Vision offering. Fox, Panasonic and Samsung will seek wide deployment of the HDR10+ licensing program once license terms are announced publicly at CES, Kaye told us. “We hope everybody adopts it,” he said. “That’s the intent of something like this with an open standard, to get as many device manufacturers, chip manufacturers, content providers, as possible, and that’s what we’ll try to attain.” The “ease of authoring” content with HDR10+ will lead to many more HDR films “becoming available” than previously thought, said Michiko Ogawa, who runs Panasonic's home entertainment business.
Sinclair’s One Media met with FCC commissioners or their aides twice in the past week to press its argument for incorporating only the ATSC’s A/321 document on “System Discovery and Signaling,” not the A/322 standard on “Physical Layer Protocol,” into ATSC 3.0 rules, filings in docket 16-142 show. The FCC “should avoid over-regulation to permit innovation,” One Media told Commissioner Mike O’Rielly and aide Erin McGrath in Thursday meetings, said the company's latest ex parte notice, posted Friday. The commission need not mandate A/322 “to ensure universal compatibility,” it said. “Equipment manufacturers build to industry standards -- and service providers use those standards -- in the ordinary course without any government mandates,” it said. “Mandating A/322 would hamper innovation without any corresponding benefit.” One Media has support from NAB, PBS and Pearl TV in urging exclusion of A/322, while LG Electronics has been the strongest advocate for including it as a critical measure to help prevent receiver compatibility problems (see 1707120044). CTA recently urged the FCC to write final rules to “encourage” adoption of A/322, but in keeping with the voluntary, market-driven nature of the 3.0 transition, it stopped well short of seeking an A/322 requirement (see 1706090026).
LG is “substantially” underpaying the royalties it owes on Advanced Audio Coding product shipments since signing a January 2009 patent licensing agreement to use the audio-compression technology, and has thwarted auditors from examining its “books and records,” alleged Via Licensing (in Pacer) Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Oakland. Via runs the AAC patent pool for parent Dolby Labs and Ericsson, Microsoft, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic and others. LG “breached its obligations to cooperate, and refused to allow a full and fair audit of its sales” under the license agreement, it said. LG didn’t comment Friday. The license sets a “standard” royalty fee structure that starts at 98 cents a unit for the first 500,000 AAC devices shipped in any country globally, and scales down to 10 cents a unit for device quantities of 75 million units or more.