Pandora launched on Monday Thumbprint Radio, what it dubbed a “hyper-personalized” station that's tailored to listeners’ unique thumbs-up feedback. Chief Product Officer Chris Phillips called Thumbprint Radio a “collaboration between each listener and Pandora,” a dynamic collection of users’ favorite music that they’ve selected with a thumbs-up. The more a listener “thumbs,” the “better their station will get,” Phillips said. Our first listen to Thumbprint Radio started with Clair de Lune by Debussy, followed by Erik Satie’s Gymnopedies, and then jumped to House of the Rising Sun by The Animals and Time of the Season by The Zombies -- all tunes we pegged as favorites but decidedly not in the same list or for the same listening mood. Pandora said Thumbprint Radio is “not simply all of your thumbs up on shuffle” but “an experience that will seamlessly guide listeners through the wide variety of their favorites, while weaving in new music discovery along the way.” Once listeners have shared their stations, Pandora said, it dynamically updates the channel in real time based on subsequent thumbs-up ratings.

Hulu, Yahoo and Zealot Networks will join Time's video distribution network, meaning Time video will be available via those online video distributors, Time said in a news release Thursday. Time said it now has 18 such distribution partners, including Amazon/Amazon Video Shorts, AOL/AOLon, CBS Local Digital Media, Cinesport, Gannett/USA Today, Nexstar and Vessel’s Video Service, and also said it intends to expand that distribution network internationally.

Pandora is now on Apple TV, it said Thursday, joining Apple Music as a native music content source. The Pandora app is on more than 1,000 CE devices, including connected speakers, gaming consoles, smart TVs and wearables in the U.S. Australia and New Zealand, the company said.

The UHD Alliance has completed work on “premium specifications” for Ultra HD displays, content and distribution, and will disclose details on those specs at CES, along with a “consumer-facing certification logo” for compliant products, it said in a Tuesday announcement. “Advances in resolution, brightness, contrast, color and audio will enable certified displays and content to replicate the richness of life’s sights and sounds and allow in-home viewers to more fully and accurately experience the content creator’s vision,” the alliance said. Alliance President Hanno Basse, Fox corporate chief technology officer, promised at IFA in Berlin that his group would have “a lot of things to share” at CES, including perhaps details on a dual-logo program for compliant hardware products (see 1509080050). Tuesday’s announcement made no mention of dual logos, only that the specs “cover a combination of key features and consumer-tested benchmarks that will usher in a new era of in-home entertainment.”

Despite a rental price hike last December and “managing inventory well,” Redbox “misjudged demand” in video rental business from its DVD kiosks, Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said Tuesday. The company's stock fell 24.1 percent Tuesday to $44.04. Redbox parent Outerwall cut its outlook Monday amid a Redbox management change, the company said in an SEC 8-K filing. Amazon and Apple “have cannibalized a large portion of Redbox traffic from its convenience-oriented customers,” Pachter said. He expects Redbox core value-conscious customers to “remain loyal so long as there is a significant price differential between Redbox rentals and most on-demand offerings.” Outerwall attributed the lower guidance to heavier promotional spending and additional content purchases designed to “encourage consumers to return to normal rental patterns,” the filing said. Since content was already purchased, “there was less opportunity to offset the lower revenue,” it said. Redbox business continues to be challenged by “the historically low box office during the third quarter, which was the worst theatrical box office in Redbox kiosks in four years,” it said.

In wake of the Paris and San Bernardino, California, terrorist attacks, Jack Kleinhenz, chief economist at the National Retail Federation, worries about the “geopolitical fears” of terrorism and the impact those fears might have on consumer confidence heading into 2016, he said on a Monday webinar that NRF sponsored jointly with the Consumer Technology Association. “My concern is whether those fears get more intense and translate into a bit of a holdup” in how consumers “see the future,” Kleinhenz said. “I believe consumers are going to spend based on their confidence,” he said. “Consumer confidence numbers are important. They’re a little bit fickle at times.” News coverage about the Paris and San Bernardino attacks “clearly leaves consumers unsettled and upset,” CTA Chief Economist Shawn DuBravac said. “But I don’t know if consumers broadly view all of these terrorist attacks in a connected way, such that it changes their overall perception of the trajectory of the economy, as it relates to their own financial well-being,” he said.

Despite the diversity of content consumption options, “traditional linear TV” remains a favorite among children aged 3 to 12, Futuresource Consulting’s Kid’s Tech study found. Futuresource in July canvassed more than 1,000 kids and their parents in each of four markets -- China, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. -- and found that 40 percent of the kids it studied rely primarily on free broadcast TV for their content, Futuresource said in a report. Online video services such as Netflix are at 25 percent, up from 22 percent a year ago. The study also said “the main TV screen seems to be maintaining its position as the main window to the kids' world of entertainment content.” It found 55 percent of the kids it studied in the survey watching content on the main TV screen for an average of more than six hours a week, it said Thursday. By comparison, fewer than three in 10 are watching video on a smartphone or tablet for more than six hours a week, it said.

Google’s Chromecast Audio and Google Cast could emerge as market leaders for streaming audio platforms despite competition from DTS’ Play-Fi, Qualcomm’s AllPlay and Apple’s AirPlay, ABI Research analyst Michael Inouye said in a report Thursday. “Both the device and technology have potential to be key influencers in expanding the market reach of networked audio devices by capitalizing on heightened market attention.” Google’s success with Chromecast showed the importance that pricing plays in consumer uptake of streaming media devices, Inouye said.

Nearly 8 percent of U.S. broadband households will buy a 4K UHD TV this year, said Parks Associates research released Wednesday. Some 42 percent of those surveyed said they weren’t familiar with 4K technology, said Parks. Other challenges for 4K are premium prices for the technology, it said. Functionality and Wi-Fi led the features consumers valued in TVs, said analyst Barbara Kraus. "Content availability remains a key inhibitor to 4K adoption.”

Despite the findings in a Natural Resources Defense Council report that high dynamic range potentially could have a “bigger impact” on TV energy use than the jump to Ultra HD itself (see 1511200032), the group’s energy-efficiency point man has no regrets that HDR didn’t get more play in the Energy Star 7.0 TV spec that took effect Oct. 30, he emailed us last week. EPA began working on the Energy Star 7.0 TV spec in December 2013 and finished the spec a year later when HDR technology still had little industry visibility, agency officials have said. NRDC’s “hope” is that EPA “will include HDR in its next revision” of the Energy Star TV spec, said NRDC Senior Scientist Noah Horowitz. “The missing piece of course is the absence of HDR content in the test method.” Unless an HDR-ready set is tested with real HDR content, one can’t “capture the extra energy consumed by these TVs when HDR content is played,” Horowitz said. EPA officials have told us they’ll monitor market developments to see whether HDR “correlates” with an increase in TV power consumption, and if it does, they'll begin revising the Energy Star TV spec to account for that.