Slashdot Mirror
Alfred Poor Says HDTV Manufacturers are Hurting (Video)
The last time we talked with Dr. Poor (who is now a Senior Editor at aNewDomain.net), we ran out of time and didn't get around to discussing 3-D and ultra-high-def TV and whether they're worth buying. So here he is again on the Slashdot TV screen (which is *not* high-definition), talking about the TV marketplace. This is a perfect time for that discussion, since Dark Friday is only a few weeks away, and after that we move into the month during which TVs and a lot of other items sell at a lot higher rate than they do during the rest of the year. If you're thinking about buying a new TV for yourself or as a gift this holiday season, you might want to listen to what Dr. Poor has to say on the subject before you do.
Why so gloomy sounding? Why can't it be called A Mix Of All Colors Friday?
3A 4E 22 05 C1 83 0B 7A
It's random, but my posting it here is probably considered illegal to someone.
theres no point in buying a 3dtv or a 4k ultra resolution tv when you cant watch anything on it with either... televesion is at best 1080p, and you can only get fake 3d tv. if you want to watch a 3d movie, you have to pay extra. if you want to stream movies, dont even think you will get 4k resolution any time soon. even if you could find something online with 4k resolution, you wouldnt be able to stream it without a gigabit internet connection.
The article mentions "Dark Friday" but links to a wiki page called "Black Friday". What is that about? (I know about Black Friday in the US, just not sure why the Dark Friday bit)
Trolling is a art,
Here in Italy, the only form of broadcast HDTV content is via pay channels. I see them stealing a page out of the mobile phone companies, and include the TV in their contract, so that the early exit penalty would be paying off the TV. they get more consistent revenues, and the HDTV producers "Eat" the retailing margin, or they split.
Only problem, as a consumer, would be if they get the producers to include the ability "brick" the TV remotely (for non payment, for instance) and/or include some proprietary encryption.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
I used to have TVs all over the house. Now I only have two. The reason for this is the $15/mth rental on the cable box that is needed at each TV. Over three or four years the cost of this box rental exceeds the cost of the TV.
I've love to watch this video, but the 2-minute IBM advert is too much for me to handle...
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Why is there no summary or transcript? Watching a video to hear a few words is a completely wasteful use of bandwidth and time.
See the "Hide/Show Transcript" link just under the video?
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I'm thinking of buying an ultra-high def TV so I can hook up my old Atari 2600. Hopefully it'll look sharp.
Oh, didn't see it. Oops.
what is this doing hear
by not creating products nobody wants
did you forget to take your meds?
i have a 3 year old Panny 42" LCD TV. no LED backlit and no smart TV, just a cheapo LCD
night time its awesome. in the day time the screen is too dark
will going to LED or some other model fix this?
Just click the ---Hide/Show Transcript--- link under the video . . .
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
If I'm going to suffer through a 2 minute commercial lead-in for a "doctor" video it better be a doctor that can cure heart disease or cancer instead of one telling me I should buy a 3-D television.
One of the things about 3D is that the consumers have shown that they are not particularly interested in spending a whole lot more money in order to get 3D. And the installed base is growing but it is not growing fast enough to support the development projects by the broadcasters and the content producers. ESPN was singular for being way out in front on developing 3D content especially for live sports coverage. And they have actually pulled the plug on a lot of that activity now because I think, in part, they are just not getting the viewership for it.
Smart observation. But then...
And it is just a matter of time in my opinion for the installed base to get to the point where people are going to be able to take advantage of it and will want to take advantage of it,
WRONG CONCLUSION.
People do not want 3dtv. The market research shows this clearly, as he himself states. Then he does a 180 and starts pushing 3d. The fact that it's baked into every TV on Best Buy's shelves (for a significant markup, of course) is NOT A GOOD THING. Maybe TV sales wouldn't be so damn bad if TV manufacturers didn't keep trying to shove every damn bell and whistle in our faces for an extra $100. Just give us a big, pretty screen. That's all we want. No cameras in our TVs, no 3d, no internet bullshit. If I want internet on my TV I'll plug my computer into the HDMI port. If I want a camera I'll plug in a camera. If I want 3d I'll...wait, I'll never want 3d, because it's retarded.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
At least it's not HD.
RE: if it doesn't work with a standard QAM tuner, it shouldn't count as cable TV!
Call it "Encrypted Cable TV"
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Seriously, if you want to buy electronics you either do it on Cyber Monday or you do it in February.
Everyone knows that.
We don't care about 3D.
We also don't care about 4D.
Nobody cares what the "industry" wants us to buy.
The only reason we even bought 1080p HDTV sets in the first place was we were forced to.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
OK, I am trolling a bit. However, LCD does let animals see and understand TV much better than CRT. Why not make better audio for animals :). I want to know my cats are getting the best quality when they run from hearing a doorbell on TV or hear a recognizable animal sound.
HDTV was a once in a generation thing. Once everybody's upgraded, you're not going to maintain sales levels like that. Too bad for you if you didn't figure that into you depreciation model for your billion-dollar factory.
They've tried gimmicks to bolster sales. 3D, actually at least requires they purchase a new set. "smart" TV is just plugging a common computer into their existing display, Samsung's come that realization and now sells an upgrade box for their sets.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I would buy a 3D printer that plugs into my TV, provided it used organic compostable food "plastics".
That would be cool.
It would go well with my 1000 Gbps internet connection that will be rolled out nationwide within 10 miles of all top tier research universities in North America. For only $10 a month.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Sales spiked up during the HD transition because everyone was upgrading from SD to HD. The benefits were obvious and easily viewable.
Those days are over. I don't want fake 3d with stupid glasses. I don't need a TV with a camera that can Skype, my phone already does it (better). There's simply no reason why I'd need to buy another new TV, unless my current one dies.
Sorry TV makers, but this is the new normal. If you set up expecting things to stay in transition sales mode forever, than it sucks to be you.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Well, that was a piss-poor tie-in. Why would someone who's buying a TV possibly care what some pundit has to say? I don't care how sure he is that 3D is the future, I'm still not buying a 3D TV at any price.
And just what does he have to say? He's mostly giving us his take on what consumers are buying... So how should we use his projections of what we are buying, to decide what we want to buy? I'd prefer to just skip the unnecessary extra step in there.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I recently had to replace my old Bluray player, and the $60 Samsung I got came with both wifi and all the internet Netflix/Hulu stuff. I'm having a hard time justifying ever replacing my old plasma until if/when it ever breaks.
This is obvious as a post digital transition impact (predictable
if your eyes are open).
In a time period that was 5% of the life of a TV virtually all
TVs were made obsolete. More interesting to me is this
made moot a lot of tube technology patents and vastly
increased the value of current flat TV patents, sort of.
I should note that when I finally replace my big flat panel
many of the interesting patents will have expired or been
cross licensed.
The result of that is virtually all households replaced their older
but still working fine TVs with lower power flat panel devices.
We are going to see the same thing in the CFE and LED lighting
industry when the new lamps have a 10 year life in contrast....
"Typical incandescent bulbs last 1,000 to 2,000 hours. But in
speaking about LED replacements, lamp life is routinely quoted
as 25,000 to 50,000 hours." (per the web).
A 25x increase in life if true will have astounding impact on the
viability of companies making these lamps.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
The brightest plasma screens are far darker than the brightest LCD screens (which are so bright you have to turn them down in a dim room otherwise they're uncomfortable to watch).
Plasma has better colours, better viewing angle, better blacks, etc. But it's not brighter.
It's not dark Friday, it's black Friday you politically correct wander. It has NOTHING to do with race.
In fact in the context "dark" Friday didn't even make euphemistic sense.
-Styopa
FYI, regardless of what parents have been telling their kids for decades, most people actually sit too far away from their TVs to enjoy the optimal immersive visual experience
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimum_HDTV_viewing_distance
Not surprised the industry is hurting.
There is also a small, but growing, trend of less television screens in American homes. According to Nelson, the numbers have dropped down 5% in the past two years, and many people are beginning to watch video on different devices, or in some cases, "pull the plug."
I can see the difference. I want it first for my "computer" display but that can be my "TV" display too.
There are geeks who share a household with people who are fans of American football and ice hockey. The leagues' online services tend to get blacked out in areas where a game is shown on cable TV.
Phosphors? I thought LCD had defeated plasma in the market. But I am aware that the upscalers in some brands of HDTV don't especially like the nonstandard 240p (NTSC) or 288p (PAL) signals that the vast majority of pre-Dreamcast consoles put out.
Just give me a media PC built into my TV, I could run games on it as well.
Why does it need to be built in? You could just buy a PC and put it next to the television. I'm told a Mac mini works wonderfully for that use case. And if they're separate, you can upgrade one without having to re-buy the other.
because the link is in 3D. You need to upgrade your monitor.
Table-ized A.I.
You mean like what NBC is doing?
You must have a bunch of astroturfing accounts here. Someone (yourself I propose) modded your apology as Informative. Looks to me like you needed to save some face after flying off the handle about a video news reel. You'dve saved more face by just not responding.
They do fine. I don't need the fancy stuff. They still work. One of them is from January 1996 and worked this morning. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Sorry TV/Monitor dudes you guys are starting to learn what the Sound Card/Stero receiver makers have already learned. Eventually your tech will hit the human limit and there is nothing more you can do other than make it either bigger (still lot's of empty wall space left), cheaper (heading down fast this year), smaller (finished already), or interegrate into something else (happening quickly). I'll take wider fields of view for rap around gaming, but until you come up with holideck style projections, I'll be buying my future monitors (Tv's with tuners and crapy refresh rates are nearly completely pointless) when they break and a price point that is going to make your shareholders weep.
I have a 60" 1080P set that is 8 feet from my couch, or 96 inches. I actually fluked out, without knowing this in advance or even thinking about it at the time, in that a 60" 1080P image only has visible pixels at up to 94 inches away, beyond which point you're past the average retina capability. Punch in 1920 x 1080 and 60" at this site. http://isthisretina.com/
Not only that, but I don't think I would want to sit closer than 8 feet from a set that big, anyway. It's a pretty big image from that far away. Now, if you go back to http://isthisretina.com/ and punch in 3840 x 2160 and 60" and what do you get? Half of what you did before, or 47"! Sorry, but I do not want to sit 47" away from a 60" TV in order to appreciate all the pixels I would have paid for.
Now, extrapolate. If I wanted to continue to sit 8 feet from my TV, but I wanted a 4K TV that I could actually see (or nearly see) the pixels I paid for, knowing the information from above, how big would it need to be? That's right, 120" is what it would need to be. So we get back to the same problem again. I don't think I would want to sit 8 feet away from a 120" TV. But that's exactly what I would need to do in order to make use of 3840 x 2160 at that distance.
Maybe that wouldn't be too bad for watching movies, actually, but I doubt I would want to carry out my regular TV watching at that size/distance. I wouldn't mind trying it, but I am not confident that I would actually like it. Again, maybe for movies. Maybe.
How long is this stupid IBM video? Even television isn't this bad.
I don't have any problem with 4K. It looks fantastic. And after I upgrade a camcorder or two to 4K, after the industry speaks on the delivery formats, etc. I will probably buy a 4K television. I upgraded from a 71" DLP to a 70" LCD/LED last Spring, with "passive" stereoscopic display (aka "3D"). It's a great TV... and this kind of illustrates why 4K might not win. After all, I'm one of the few customers who understands this (as are many here, I'm sure) and knows it's something I want and can use. Though I'd probably want 80-85" in my current media room. That'll fit just dandy, but the only 4K model I saw at 85" ran about $25,000.
As in many things, "good enough" is the enemy of excellent. It's been pretty well established that most consumers don't give a damn about better-then-CD quality audio. Both DVD-Audio and SACD failed to deliver anything but niche products and media. No, the format war didn't help. Blu-ray Audio could eventually do better, but mostly by not being anything fundamentally different than regular Blu-ray.. both earlier formats required new players to really deliver the promised improvements. And the simple fact was that most consumers didn't have good enough audio systems for CD. Meanwhile, the lower-than-CD-quality MP3 player took off like nothing else before.
Here's the problem with the TV industry... television had one major change from its introduction until HDTV... it went to color. That didn't force anyone to upgrade, though eventually folks did; tube TVs didn't last forever. And sure, there were tweaks to the technology, but regular consumers didn't know they now had active comb filters or whatever... SDTV was still just SDTV.
Then HDTV came along. Many didn't buy a first generation HDTV, but I did. A big, expensive, 3-CRT back projection model, $4K+ and 600lbs, analog inputs only. Of course, HDTV came along at the same time everyone realized the CRT was leaving us but not settled on the successor. Most of the early-adopter types upgraded from their analog HDTVs to all-digital HDTVs at more or less the same time the general population was upgrading. That's when I got my 71" DLP... it was the winner in a price-performance shootout with a Pioneer Plasma and a Sony LCOS display... your main choices for large screens in 2005-2006. So this second round did great things for the TV makers... rather than get upgrades as the old devices failed, they had people upgrading after 5-7 years. Pretty sweet.
So naturally, they sought to keep that momentum going. What could do that? Stereo! Or as they dubbed it, 3D. Blame "Avatar", maybe, but they model from Samsung one year after my DLP came with a 3D sync output, the idea being support of 3D games, much as folks like nVidia were already playing around with on PCs. Why? That output cost them all of $0.50 to implement (eg, routing a known signal to the outside world, and that price is assuming a buffer). Mature 3DTV was nearly as cheap. The active systems added virtually no cost to the display, some LED or Bluetooth circuit for frame sync, rather than the RCA jack, but not substantial, under $2.00. The glasses were certainly more, but they're getting $100 retail for replacements, and at one point got substantially more for the television. The passive system needs an accurately registered alternate-line circular polarizer, but that's just replacing the usual LCD polarizer, so maybe a little more expensive, but not even an extra part. And the glasses are much the same as the "throw away" RealD glasses you get at the movies... essentially, they're sunglasses. These all commanded a higher profit margin in a very competitive industry (Samsung's sales in CE is about half of their sales in Mobile; the profits in CE are tiny compared to Mobile, and Samsung's the world's largest TV maker). For awhile.. today, the price is settled where CE prices always settle... cheap. 3D is just another expected feature on higher-end TVs, just as Blu-ray has become an expected feature of any DVD player over $50.
So now everyone who might even consider 4K
-Dave Haynie