A National Advertising Review Board (NARB) panel wants AT&T's DirecTV to “better disclose” to consumers that only limited programming on its service is available in 4K, the Council of Better Business Bureaus-affiliated group said in a Tuesday announcement. NARB also wants DirecTV to modify its claim the service is wireless, and to discontinue claims that a “free upgrade” to Genie HD DVRs is available, the announcement said. The council’s National Advertising Division (NAD) ruled in December that DirecTV should change or end advertising claims challenged by Charter Communications about prices and wireless offerings and what Charter termed the misleading suggestion that all DirecTV programming is available in 4K resolution. DirecTV appealed the decision to NARB (see 1512100053), whose panel sided with NAD that DirecTV’s claims on the amount of 4K content on the service “reasonably communicated messages that were not supported by the evidence in the record.” But the panel disagreed with NAD that DirecTV must modify its claims by addressing “the developing nature of 4K technology and indicate that currently only a small amount of programming is available in 4K.” The panel said “reasonable consumers” will understand “the nature of developing technologies and the fact that 4K is a relatively new technology,” and “it would be sufficient for DirecTV to clearly and conspicuously disclose the limited programming available in 4K.” DirecTV representatives didn’t comment Tuesday. The council quoted the satellite operator as saying it will “comply with NARB's recommendations in future advertising,” though it disagrees with NARB’s findings that it modify its claims that the service is wireless, and will discontinue claims that a “free upgrade” to Genie HD DVRs was available.
In the four years in which the California Energy Commission “has spent public resources trying to figure how to regulate computers and displays,” the consumer technology industry “has been busy making real energy efficiency progress,” said Doug Johnson, CTA vice president-technology policy, of a final CEC staff report on energy efficiency standards for computers and monitors that got praise Friday from consumer groups (see 1609090063). CTA research shows that “even as we use more devices in our homes, their share of U.S. household electricity has declined,” Johnson emailed us Monday. “While the CEC undoubtedly has good intentions with this rulemaking, they continue to drive regulation by looking through the rear-view mirror,” Johnson said. “Every day our industry is innovating to create better, lighter and more energy efficient products. In the past few years, CTA has championed new approaches to saving energy and contributing to carbon emissions reduction goals.” Recent voluntary agreements on energy efficiency for pay-TV set-top boxes and small network equipment “are great examples of the private sector delivering energy savings faster than regulation while protecting innovation and competition, and avoiding costs and burdens to consumers and local businesses,” Johnson said. “Unfortunately, this regulatory proposal for computers and displays represents inside-the-box thinking at a time when both government and industry need to be agile and creative in developing less costly and less time-consuming solutions for saving energy,” Johnson said of CEC’s staff report. It said its proposed computer and monitor standards are “technically feasible and cost-effective to consumers and would save a significant amount of energy statewide.”
Resolution of the Samsung Galaxy Note7 battery-fire-hazard issue won’t come until after the Consumer Product Safety Commission issues an “official recall” notice on the smartphones, and that won’t happen until CPSC is "confident" Galaxy Note7 replacements are safer than the originals, an agency spokesman told us Monday. Meantime, CPSC wants consumers to power down their Galaxy Note7s and not recharge them and wait until an official recall notice is available, the agency said in a news statement Friday.
SoC supplier Sigma Designs thinks high-dynamic-range adoption is “widespread right now” among its base of TV-maker customers, said Ken Lowe, vice president-strategic marketing, on a Tuesday earnings call. “Everybody that we’re working with right now” on 4K TV design wins “is designing TVs that are HDR-enabled,” Lowe said. For TV makers, HDR’s only sticking point is deciding “which specific version of it” to use, he said. HDR10 has had the widest adoption so far because it has “the lowest costs,” but the hybrid-log-gamma technology espoused by the BBC and NHK “seems to be getting more popular,” Lowe said. Dolby Vision “is there for a lot of people that want the premium and Dolby is going to continue to promote it,” he said. What Sigma has done with its “universal HDR” SoCs is “we’ve mitigated the risk of the making that decision,” Lowe said. Of the TV makers “we deal with,” they can “load our chip and they are covered for all the standards,” he said. “That’s the strongest position we can offer them.”
Autonomous cars are "no longer a thing of the distant future,” Pam Fletcher, General Motors executive chief engineer, told a Citigroup technology conference in New York. Not everyone “can operate a car, so autonomous vehicles provide them with an option,” she said Tuesday. “The most important benefit we see is absolutely safety.” More than 35,000 people die yearly on U.S. roads, and more than 90 percent “of those deaths are caused by human error," she said. GM’s $581 million acquisition of Cruise Automation in March (see 1607220003) “provides us with a team of talented software engineers who are creating the algorithms and the code to bring full autonomy to life and deliver autonomous technology in an on-demand ride-sharing service,” Fletcher said. What really attracted GM to Cruise was not only its autonomous-driving capabilities, but also that it was developing them “literally on the downtown streets of San Francisco,” she said. As an autonomous-driving test bed, San Francisco is “one of the most complex environments to try to build and deploy new technology,” she said. “The right answer for deployment of autonomous vehicles is in a ride-shared network." GM invested in Lyft (see 1601040068).
It’s “wrong” to pit HDR10 in a “format war” with Dolby Vision for supremacy in high dynamic range, said an Insight Media white paper Monday, explaining the similarities and differences between the two technologies. Think of HDR10 as a “subset” of Dolby Vision, said the paper from a firm with clients in the broadcast and other industries according to its website. Dolby Vision “is a more comprehensive approach that has value in the market, while HDR10 is more like a special ‘light’ case of Dolby Vision,” also with marketplace value, said Insight. “Both formats, and others, will coexist in the market with no winners or losers.”
With fully autonomous vehicles only a “few years” away from mass production, “regulators, business leaders and consumers should embrace this revolution, not fear it,” CTA President Gary Shapiro said in a Monday opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal. For self-driving car technology “to truly gain speed,” carmakers “need to be able to test their cars on all kinds of roads in various conditions,” Shapiro said. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is drafting operational guidelines on self-driving cars (see 1608250049), Shapiro said. “In the absence of federal guidance, state regulatory policies run the gamut. ... Instead of squashing experiments in the states, federal regulators ought to defer, allowing controlled markets like those in California and Michigan to grow. What happens there now will make its way into fully autonomous cars for the rest of us later.” Shapiro emailed us Tuesday to emphasize that "my point" in the opinion piece "was that states need some leeway to experiment and compete in the early stages" of autonomous-car development, not that federal regulators should bow out of any involvement. In fact, Shapiro thinks "there is a huge federal role" to be played in autonomous cars, he said, and even called on President Barack Obama in a December op-ed piece to convene a government-industry advisory committee on driverless cars modeled after an effort in the 1980s during the Reagan administration that helped jump-start the transition to digital TV.
With IFA to open to the public beginning Friday, we observed crews placing signs Thursday at key entrances to the Messe Berlin fairgrounds warning visitors to the international consumer electronics show in Berlin to be aware of added security measures. “We ask for your understanding for our additional security checks,” read the signs we saw Thursday in German and English outside IFA’s North entrance. The signs urge visitors to use the smartphone app KATWARN for “fast and direct information” about the security restrictions and about any potential trouble. KATWARN bills itself as a free service developed by Fraunhofer that tells the user not only that “there is a dangerous situation, but also HOW you should behave,” said the service’s website. Airport-style metal detectors were visible at three entrances to the fairgrounds we visited since arriving Tuesday in Berlin when there never have been any at previous IFA shows. But we saw none in use for the Wednesday and Thursday IFA news-media days, nor were there any obvious added security measures put in place for reporters covering IFA, such as the type of restricted bag policies CES imposed in January after the November terrorist attacks in Paris (see 1512180053).
Not all is bad in forecasts from the research firm GfK that 2016 sales in the global consumer electronics sector will decline 5 percent to 814 billion euros (about $908 billion), Hans-Joachim Kamp, chairman of the supervisory board of CE trade-show IFA organizer gfu, told the opening IFA news conference in Berlin Wednesday. GfK 2016 forecasts, according to Kamp, that wearables of all types will grow 58 percent to 122 million, while smartphones rise 5 percent to 1.4 billion.
Broadcasters that adopt ATSC 3.0 will need to decide how best to serve both high-dynamic-range streams to HDR TVs and standard-dynamic-range streams “to legacy TVs over the ATSC 3.0 environment,” but after the FCC incentive auction won’t have “the ability to simulcast or use two-layer delivery systems to light up SDR and HDR screens simultaneously.” So said a new white paper, "HDR over ATSC 3.0: A Technology Impact Analysis for Broadcast Industry," co-authored by Alan Stein, Technicolor vice president-R&D, and Gérard Faria, chief technology officer at broadcast-equipment supplier TeamCast.