January, 2011 | HD TV PROFESSOR

Month: January 2011

15 More Minutes of Fame

January 17, 2011 | Ibex Marketing

Actually, it's just under 8 minutes this time. The HDTV Almanac is syndicated through Newstex, a service that provides "authoritative content" from a variety of online sources. And I'm pleased that they chose the Almanac as one of their sources. The company has a new program of video interviews with some of their authors and publishers, and they chose to interview me about HDTV Almanac. Here's the video. If you...

CES 2011: Are TV Makers Doing an “Osborne”?

January 14, 2011 | Ibex Marketing

The big buzz at CES 2011 was about the auto-stereoscopic 3DTV demonstrations that seemed to be everywhere. Toshiba, Sony, and LG all had demo screens available that worked without glasses. Some are designed for single viewers, which is okay. Some were designed for multiple viewers, which I don't think will work in the typical American living room. I have decided to diagram the problem. In this schematic, the HDTV at...

CES 2011: More Choices for Hurricane Kits

January 13, 2011 | Ibex Marketing

Back when the digital transition was pending, I raised the question of battery-powered portable televisions for use in emergencies. The old analog sets that people had stored in their hurricane kits no longer work with the digital signals. At first, there were few choices. Now the market has responded and you've got more choices than in those early days of digital broadcasts. At CES 2011, however, I found some interesting...

CES 2011: Pico Projectors Coming

January 12, 2011 | Ibex Marketing

Take your iPod or iPad and plop it in a handy dock to recharge; that's not unusual. The dock has speakers so you can listen to your music with room-filling sound. Also not so unusual. But look at this: The Cinemin Slice from WowWee is a docking station that includes a pico projector so you can view photos or videos from your iProduct device. Pretty cool, huh? The fact is...

CES 2011: Yahoo! Connected TVs

January 11, 2011 | Ibex Marketing

Consumers are discovering that there's a lot of good content available on the Internet. Netflix is getting a lot of the attention, especially with the statistic that at peak times, it accounts for 20% of all Internet traffic in the U.S. That's astounding. Television manufacturers are going to make that proportion increase, it appears, as many are adding network connectivity to their sets. Yahoo! Connected TV is perhaps the leading...

CES 2011: Now THAT’S an LED TV!

January 10, 2011 | Ibex Marketing

CORRECTION: My thanks for friend and colleague Peter Putman for pointing out my error. Please see below. Wandering around the LVCC Central Hall, I rounded a corner and saw this at the Mitsubishi pavillion: That screen is 155" diagonal. Yes, that's equivalent to more than nine 50" panels. It's big. (Look at the person standing beside the lower left corner to get a sense of the scale.) There are two...

CES 2011: What’s That Show?

January 7, 2011 | Ibex Marketing

My wife was watching Glee the other night, and I thought I recognized one actress as someone who has starred in movies. In a typical senior moment, however, I could not come up with her name or any of the movies, which left me with the stammering conversation, "That's whats-her-name, right? The one who has been in all those movies like ummm, whatever?" Not too helpful. If I had an...

CES 2011: 3D Glasses Improve Rapidly

January 6, 2011 | Ibex Marketing

"Those goofy glasses." It's one of the biggest stumbling blocks for 3DTV with many consumers, and I can't blame them. Many of the active shutter glasses look like something out of a 50s science fiction B movie. And the passive glasses that you get in the movie theaters make Buddy Holly and Elvis Costello's eyewear look stylish. But CES 2011 is full of new ideas for glasses. (No, the show...

CES 2011: 3Takes on 3DTV

January 5, 2011 | Ibex Marketing

CES 2011 Day -1: No, the show doesn't open until tomorrow, but I arrived in Las Vegas yesterday because it starts two days early for the press. So I had a bunch of events to deal with yesterday. There are a lot of interesting themes emerging already, but I was particularly interested by three different views on 3DTVs that I encountered at last night's events. First, I got my first...

2010 A Good Year for LCD HDTV

January 4, 2011 | Ibex Marketing

According to a new report from DisplaySearch, 2010 was a good year for LCD television shipments worldwide. Total shipments are expected to top 190 million units, which is a whopping 31% increase over the 2009 figures. This is a bit of a surprise, given the worldwide recession, but apparently the demand increased in response to the prices that continued to plummet. Shipments for North America only showed a 0.4% increase...

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