Retail reaction has been “excellent” to Movado’s debut of its first Android Wear smartwatch, CEO Efraim Grinberg said on a Thursday earnings call. The company plans to introduce the smartwatch, called Movado Connect, in Q3 (see 1703080045). The category isn't material to the company, and margins aren't “as attractive” as in “traditional” watches, said Grinberg. Movado shares fell nearly 6 percent midday Friday before recovering to finish the day 3.4 percent lower at $21.40 after the company missed its revenue and earnings targets for Q1 ended April 30.
Ethernet connections are going to become "more prolific" in autos, said Marvell Technology CEO Matt Murphy on an earnings call. He cited a vision dating to 2007 of "upgrading that legacy bus in the car,” by connecting disparate electronic control units “on one packet-based network" and said it's "starting to happen.” Having "been involved with automotive for quite a bit of time ... when I got really involved with my old company, this concept of Ethernet in the vehicle was around even then,” said Murphy of his past executive role with chip supplier Maxim Integrated. The automotive Ethernet connections business isn’t expected to flourish before 2019, he said Thursday.
Google is working on “a secret project” in virtual reality by partnering “deeply” with a “leading OLED manufacturer” to create a VR-capable display “with 10X more pixels," said Clay Bavor, vice president-VR, at a Society for Information Display conference in Los Angeles. He later declined to answer our question to identify the company. A representative then physically restrained us from a follow-up query. Better VR displays may have the “horrifying” result of requiring 100 Gbps, Bavor told the conference Tuesday. “Not only can you not render that much data, you can’t even transfer it,” he said. “You can’t even move it around the device.” Google didn't reply to our requests for comment Tuesday or Wednesday.
The “biggest thing” about ATSC 3.0 from Sony Electronics' “perspective” is that it’s “designed to last, to evolve and endure,” Paul Hearty, vice president-technology standards, told last week’s ATSC conference in Washington. “When we did ATSC 1.0, I think it took us nine very painful years,” said Hearty. ATSC 3.0 “has taken us six and a bit,” he said. “But 3.1, maybe it will be only a year or six months or eight months." The HTML5 “ship” at ATSC 3.0's IP core "sailed into our products, and we’re all supporting it,” Hearty said of the prevalence of smart TVs in the consumer tech market. “One of the challenges we’re going to have to face is that we’ve got to figure out how we’re going to accommodate the runtime platform” in ATSC 3.0 “with the platforms that we already have in our devices,” he said.
The ATSC 3.0 receiver chipsets that Saankhya Labs is developing on the “fast track” with Sinclair’s One Media (see 1703280044) should be available in time to be deployed in smartphones and other consumer products for the 2018 holiday selling season, Saankhya CEO Parag Naik told us Friday. “We’re discussing the scale,” and will know the timetable “in about a month’s time,” said Naik. Saankhya’s software-defined radio platform will allow for chips that can accommodate other global broadcast standards, he said. “Depending on the application, depending on the customer, we could have a different product mix” based on variations of the same chipset design, he said. “For example, the same chip could be used for fixed receivers,” like large-screen TVs, and “also gateways,” in addition to mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, he said. Naik sees the U.S. as hosting the first worldwide commercial deployment of the Saankhya chipsets for ATSC 3.0. In South Korea, which is scheduled to formally launch ATSC 3.0 services in a matter of days, “we are talking to OEMs there as well,” he said. Sinclair’s offer at last week’s ATSC conference to give out the receiver chips for free (see 1705170033) is part of an effort “to seed the market,” said Naik. Component costs are “a function of the volume,” he said. “Once the market gets seeded and critical mass is achieved, your costs will drop and it becomes ubiquitous, and almost everyone then will probably start to put it in his phones or TVs.”
Flexible OLEDs for smartphones will “enable larger displays that fit in a smaller area,” so the displays are expected to expand to “seven, nine, even 10 inches" and "become quasi-tablets,” Ross Young, CEO of Display Supply Chain Consultants, told a Display Week conference Monday here in Los Angeles. DSSC sees that “as a huge opportunity for Apple and Samsung in particular, as they have secured a much higher capacity in OLEDs than they have in the overall smartphone market,” said Young. “We see a growing number of prototypes for foldable displays, and I think it makes perfect sense to want to have a tablet that you could fold, and it becomes a smartphone. Who wouldn’t want a bigger display on their smartphone?” Technical "challenges” must be overcome before foldable OLED displays can be “high-yielding” at the factory, said Young.
The “skyscraper” that symbolizes the “suite” of 23 standards comprising ATSC 3.0 “is getting fairly bottom-heavy, which is good, more stable,” Rich Chernock, Triveni Digital chief science officer, told an ATSC conference Wednesday. “Most of the standards are either finalized or in the proposed standard stage,” said Chernock, who chairs Technology Group 3 that’s tasked with supervising the framing of the next-gen standard.
With about three weeks before EPA releases the final draft of its version 8.0 Energy Star TV specification, the agency is considering important changes, officials told a webinar. There could be further tightening of limits against disabling the energy-saving automatic brightness control (ABC) feature in preset picture modes if a TV is to qualify for Energy Star V8.0, EPA said Monday. EPA is considering whether to require ABC be enabled by default across all preset picture settings, Emmy Feldman, an associate at EPA consultant ICF International, told the webinar. EPA “heard from other manufacturers, and in response to draft one, that implementing ABC in every preset picture setting may not be appropriate,” Feldman said. Comments are due May 24 on the second draft. EPA sees V8.0 taking effect in March or April, said Verena Radulovic, Energy Star product manager-consumer electronics.
Broadcasters see ATSC 3.0 as the gateway for delivering better pictures to the viewing public almost immediately after launch, engineers told an ATSC conference Tuesday. Bandwidth constraints have many looking toward using 1080p with “enhancements” like high dynamic range in launching ATSC 3.0, at least as an “interim” approach, they said.
Vizio developed a system of "tracking pixels and cookies" that enables "real-time" monitoring of TV "programming consumption specific to an individual television or other viewing device,” said a patent application published Thursday at the Patent and Trademark Office. “The ability to accurately determine in near real-time exactly what TV program or advertisement each and every TV viewer in the U.S. is watching at any moment has long been an unmet market need,” said the application, assigned to Vizio Inscape Technologies, and naming Zeev Neumeier, Michael Collette and Leo Hoarty as inventors. “One reason this has been such a challenge is because it would require being able to identify not just what channel has been tuned to, but specifically what content is being watched, since the media actually being consumed by the viewer can include not just the scheduled programming but also regionally or locally-inserted advertisements, content that has been time-shifted, or other entertainment products.” The invention envisions that information about media consumption “by such specific television sets or other viewing means may be returned to a commercial client of the system through a trusted third-party intermediary service,” it said. “In certain embodiments, encoded tokens may be used to manage the display of certain events as well as to enable robust auditing of each involved party's contractual performance.” Vizio reached an agreement with the FTC in February to pay $2.2 million to settle allegations it fashioned its Inscape viewer-tracking function in its smart TVs to spy on consumers' viewing habits without their knowledge and then sold the data to third parties (see 1702060042). Company representatives didn’t comment Monday on commercial plans to use the technology described in the new patent.