HDTV Almanac

Remember when I said you should order your digital TV converter coupon from the NTIA “today”? I hope that you did, because word comes from Washington that the agency has run through its funding and is now putting new requests on a waiting list.

According to a report in TWICE, the NTIA has filled 46 million coupon requests from 24 million households. According to Nielsen, there are about 14.3 million U.S. households that depend solely on over-the-air TV broadcasts, and the NTIA says that they have fulfilled requests from about 12.6 million of them. If those numbers are right, then there are still about 1.7 million households that rely on broadcasts but who have not yet requested a coupon.

Note also that the NTIA reports that some 13 million coupons have expired without being redeemed. (You did know that they expire after 90 days, right?) The agency does not say how many of those are in the 12.6 million broadcast households that requested coupons.

The bottom line is that there are likely to be millions of households who will not get coupons in time, if ever, and many homes that rely on broadcast television are likely to miss out on the coupons altogether. And I remain convinced that there will be millions of people who will lose their television service come February 17th.

As I’ve mentioned here on more than a few occasions, digital TV broadcast signals do not carry as far as analog signals. A weak analog signal results in a snowy picture, but a weak digital signal results in a blank screen. How can you tell what your experience will be with broadcast television after the analog transmissions stop next month?

It turns out that the FCC has been looking into this question, and have been comparing digital and analog broadcast reception in markets all across the country using techniques that predict signal quality. You can see their results at www.fcc.gov/dtv/markets/. You can download the whole report for all 1,818 stations, or you can just get the maps for a specific Nielson Designated Market Area. The maps show where coverage will be added, where it will be lost but covered by another station with the same network, and where it will be lost with no coverage from another station. For a fascinating overview of the TV coverage of the entire country, check out one of the network maps. Here’s the map for NBC; the document you can download lets you zoom right into the county level.

The green shows new coverage under digital broadcasts, orange is where a station is lost but covered by another, and red is where coverage is lost completely.

The Shell Building in London, England, was transformed into the world’s tallest video projection screen on New Year’s Eve. Revellers were treated to a projected holiday message from Mayor of London Boris Johnson and other celebrities. The installation was engineered by LG Electronics, which also sponsored the fireworks display for the evening’s festivities.

If you weren’t there to witness it in person, here’s a video clip that captures just how impressive the projection must have been.

2008 was a rough ride in many ways, but there were some silver linings. The Dow gave up 33.8% for the year, making it the worst year since 1931 during the Great Depression. Across Wall Street in general, about $7 trillion in shareholder value was lost in 2008. (That makes the Obama $1 trillion stimulus package sound almost like a bargain.) Consumers were uncertain about their future, and stayed away in droves from the stores during the holiday shopping season, making it one of the worst in years. Retailers fell left and right, including CompUSA, Tweeter, and Circuit City. The post-holiday prices appeared well before Black Friday, as retailers struggled to find cash wherever they could.

We also saw the early transition to digital TV broadcasts in Wilmington, NC, as well as a few other communities. While the Wilmington experience was generally positive, it benefited greatly from a mobilize community and lots of attention from manufacturers and broadcasters. It’s for certain that the whole country won’t have all those extra resources available when it happens for real everywhere else in February, and millions of homes are likely to be unprepared for the switch.

We more or less saw the end of rear projection television; yes, they’re still there, and people still don’t buy them. LaserTV has not turned out to be the miracle that we had hoped, and flat panel prices are now so low that it’s hard to imagine any competing technology getting a toehold any time soon.

All the same, DisplaySearch estimates that more than 102 million LCD TVs were sold worldwide in 2008, which is nearly a 30% increase over 2007. (Never mind that revenues are forecast to fall by 15% to 20% in 2009 due to lower prices.) So a lot more people are enjoying flat panel TV than there were a year ago.

I can’t say that 2009 looks much better. Once confidence is shaken – whether its the banks or the consumers — it takes a long time to recover. New jobs need to be created, and the money needs to start flowing again. But it will come in time. In the meantime, we’ll need to make careful choices about what we do with our money and our time.

Still, there are going to be some great bargains in flat panel TVs in the short term. If you have any questions about how to choose one, or if you have questions about the digital broadcast transition, let me know: alfred@hdtvprofessor.com.

Thanks for your support, and I hope that you and yours enjoy a happy and healthy 2009!

Okay, we’ve got seven weeks to go until the end of (most) analog TV broadcasts in the United States. And Nielsen reported a couple of weeks ago that at least 7 million homes still aren’t ready for the conversion. And that’s just among homes that only get TV over the air; it does not include the millions more that have secondary sets that are not connected to the cable or satellite service used with the main TV in the house.

The government program to provide discount coupons for converter boxes has handed out 44 million coupons so far. Only 18 million of those have been redeemed, however, and it’s not clear how many of the remainder have expired due to their 90-day limitation. And now it appears that Americans are waking up to the situation, and taking action. Coupon requests are up 30% over just a week ago, at which point the delivery time was running at about four weeks. As the demand increases, the wait time can only stretch out further. The NTIA is recommending that you make your request by today in order to get your coupon in time for the transition.

And then there’s the question of whether or not you’ll be able to redeem the coupon five weeks from now. The experience with Wilmington, NC and other communities that converted early indicates that chances are good that stores will be sold out of converters as you get close to the transition date. The problem can only get worse now that we’re staring down the barrel of the national conversion. It will be a challenge — to say the least — of making sure that the inventory distribution matches demand. And this problem is made more difficult by the fact that demand for the boxes is going to drop to something near zero by the end of February; everyone who needs a converter box will probably have one by then. And retailers sure don’t want a big stack of boxes that they’re never going to sell sitting in the warehouse.

And another reason to act now is to find out any surprises before your analog signal goes dark. Will you be among the 2% of households that won’t be able to receive the digital signal with the antenna that works now for your analog signal? Digital signals do not travel as well as analog, because a weak analog signal will produce a snowy picture, but a weak digital signal results in a blank screen. If you need to upgrade your antenna, the time to find that out is before you lose the analog signal.

So if you need a converter box coupon, order it today. You can request one or two coupons for your household at https://www.dtv2009.gov/ or call 1-888-DTV-2009.

LG Display announced today that it has developed a “Trumotion 480Hz” LCD HDTV panel. Yes, Virginia, that’s four times faster than the current 120 Hz specification offered by some of the top-of-the-line models from various TV makers. The point of the higher refresh rate is that it helps reduce motion blur on LCD panels. By refreshing the image faster than then standard 60 Hz — sixty times each second – the image tends to blur less from one frame to the next. LG Display claims a 4 ms Motion Picture Response Time (MPRT) for the new panel, which is a very good number. A score of 8 ms is about what the best sets get today. LG hopes to have the first Trumotion480Hz TVs on the market in the second half of 2009.

So how does LG get to 480 Hz? As it turns out, it’s a combination of two pieces. First, the panel operates at a 240 Hz refresh rate. This is twice as fast as the best current models, but there have been other 240 Hz panels demonstrated, most notably by Samsung and Sony. LG adds a scanning backlight, which it claims combines with the 240 Hz panel to “refresh 480 images per second“. Now, I suppose that this raises the question of how you define “refresh”, but I believe that there may be a bit of hyperbole in this claim. If the panel can only update 240 times a second, then it can only show 240 images a second. Even if you flash the backlight twice while each image is showing, you only get 240 images. However, it’s possible that the claim is that the LCD molecules are still moving between the 240 images, and the strobing of the backlight “freezes” them and there will be slight differences between the two backlight flashes for a single image. But I’m not sure that people will be able to see the difference between 240 Hz and “Trumotion 480Hz” in any case.

The good news is that I’ll get to see for myself next week at CES in Las Vegas. I’ll be heading out to see what’s the latest news in HDTV and related technology, and you’ll be able to read about it here. So as they say in TV Land, “stay tuned.”

Last Friday, CompUSA.com ran a one-day special on the Sylvania NB501SL9 Blu-ray DVD player, selling it for just under $180. This is about a 10% discount over the $200 price that you can find from lots of sources. My question is this; is this price low enough to entice you to switch to Blu-ray? Keep in mind that this is about four times the price of a decent upscaling DVD player (and you don’t need upscaling if your HDTV has a decent scaler in it).

Note that this Sylvania player is something less than top-of-the-line. Yes, it conforms to the Blu-ray Profile 1.1 standard, which is unfortunately named “Final Standard“. The fact is that there also is the Profile 2.0 — BD-Live – that requires a network connection so that the player can get content from the Internet. Perhaps even more limiting is the detail that the NB501SL9 apparently does not have upgradeable firmware. That is a Stone Age design by today’s standards. Yes, you’ll find plenty of glowing reviews from users on the Internet (but you should know my opinion about those by now).

So are you willing to pay four times as much as a good DVD player to get a cheap Blu-ray player? Or is it simply that when the price drops below $200 (or some other level), that you can justify going for it? Or is any price too much for Blu-ray these days, when your existing DVD player still works just fine? I remain unconvinced that Blu-ray has reached the point that it has mass appeal, but then I’ve been wrong before. Let me know how you see it; write me at alfred@hdtvprofessor.com.

What happens when people stop buying your product? Early numbers indicate that 2008 was one of the worst holiday shopping seasons on record, when you compare with the prior year. And as anticipated, inventories are still high at the retailers. From sweaters to flat screens, retailers have been slashing prices in efforts to try to get people to buy, but uncertainty about the economy and jobs as well as big losses in investments have cut deeply into the average American’s gift budget.

Just like a log jam on a river, the retail inventories are backing up through the entire supply chain. In the flat panel market, retailers are cancelling or delaying orders for new product because their warehouses are already full as they head into the traditionally slow sales season in the first half of 2009. This means that the flat panel TV manufacturers are seeing orders dwindle, and in turn, they are reducing their orders to the flat panel makers.

Flat panel makers are responding by cutting back on production. According to various reports, LG Display is suspending production on some of its lines from December 24 to January 4, Chi Mei Optoelectronics (CMO) fired 3,000 contract workers as a result of production slowdowns, Wintek layed off 10% of its employees, Innolux is running at only 80% of production capacity, and Sharp plans to close two LCD panel lines in January. And several LCD makers have announced plans to postpone construction of new fab lines. This is a difficult time for the panel makers, because they need to run their plants at full capacity in order to get the full benefits of their efficiency. The plants are expensive to build, so the manufacturing cost of each panel goes up as the plant production is scaled back. At the same time, large inventories and slowing demand are driving down the market price for the products. The flat panel industry was already highly competitive; the current conditions are likely to be downright brutal.

As a result, expect to see some makers exit the market, or consolidated with other producers in order to survive this downturn. There are already some reports that some Taiwanese LCD manufacturers are open to the suggestion that they merge. 2009 is hsaping up to be a difficult year for the LCD panel industry.

I’m celebrating Christmas today, so I’ll under the tree instead of in front of the keyboard this morning. Let me take this time to wish all of you a happy holiday season. Even in these difficult times, I hope that you find many reasons to be thankful. Whether this is your first visit to the HDTV Almanac, or have been a faithful reader for years, I thank you for your support and hope that you’ll spread the word to others who might find it helpful. And of course, please write me at alfred@hdtvprofessor.com if you have any comments or questions.

I send my best wishes to you and yours, and hope that you enjoy good health and success in the coming new year.

Here’s another name to add to the list: Theater Xtreme. The Delaware corporation ceased operations at the two company-owned stores in early December, as well as laying off all corporate employees, but took the next step of filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy last week. It is possible that the company could regroup, but it is more likely that the remaining assets will be liquidated. One important point is that the company also is a franchise operation; 11 stores around the country are privately owned under the Theater Xtreme name. These stores are not affected by the bankruptcy filing, and will continue as individually owned and operated businesses.

Theater Xtreme specializes in “affordable” home theater installations. Until recently, a home theater often cost $100,000 or more, and was definitely the domain of the upscale consumer. New high definition front projectors have lowered the price from more than $20,ooo for a projector to under $5,000, and stiff competition has helped bring other costs down as well. Still, the market for dedicated theater rooms in homes remains fairly limited. Given the credit crunch and plummetting housing market, even well-heeled homeowners are settling for a large flat screen TV (or a small one, for that matter). They’re happy to save a few dollars by making their purchase at a big box store or shopping club, which cuts deeply into the specialty store business. And Theater Xtreme was not able to get the credit it needed to weather the slowdown.

This is just another example of the hard times for specialty consumer electronics retailers and installers, and you can expect to see other similar stores go out of business in the coming year.