Pioneer’s Display Business Seen Getting Boost from Sharp Investment

The infusion of money will bolster research and development and let Pioneer keep trying to improve picture quality, which had suffered during an earlier push to expand production and compete on price, Meyhoefer said. Pioneer bought NEC’s plasma-making operations in 2004, but combining the businesses proved more challenging than either company had expected, company officials have said. Pioneer, which has long sought a 10 percent share of the worldwide plasma market, is expected to use part of the $189 million net proceeds from Sharp’s investment to fund its plasma operations. It has five plasma manufacturing lines, including one inherited with the NEC asset purchase.

In the rush to expand production, Pioneer “sacrificed” the picture quality and performance of its plasma TVs, Meyhoefer said. Launching the Kuro project two years ago, Pioneer refocused on improving its plasma technology and wasn’t worried as much about “where the market was going as far as price was concerned,” Meyhoefer said.

“We were building up to do mass production, but then our market shifted mostly because of the price erosion,” Meyhoefer told us. “We were maintaining for a while, but then when it really dropped, we couldn’t afford to do that. We're cleaning up a lot of the issues that we had with the expansion strategy and refocusing in our core technology and I feel we're at that turning point right now.” Pioneer has held the price on its new line of Kuro-based 42W ($3,200) and 50W ($4,500) Elite plasma TVs with 1,024x768 resolution as well as the 1080p-capable 50W and 60W models shipping under the Pioneer ($5,000, $6,500) and Elite ($6,000, $7,500) brands, Meyhoefer said.

With a new investor in the form of Sharp, Pioneer may consider adding LCD TVs to its product mix, but no final decisions have been made, Meyhoefer said. Pioneer had focused plasma on 40-inch and up sizes, leaving an opening for adding LCDs in the smaller screen sizes. Sharp and Pioneer have longstanding alliances. Pioneer supplied Sharp a 64W rear projection TV that enabled it to get into the CRT- based rear projection HDTV business in 1998. Sharp also used to source plasma panels from Pioneer.

“We have been constantly evaluating all of the technologies, but we didn’t feel any of them met our picture quality standards,” Meyhoefer said. “Now we feel that some of those technologies may be getting better and we will evaluate the Sharp LCD. If it makes sense and meets our standards for picture performance then we will probably introduce some products.”

Meanwhile, the installed base of DLP-based 3D-capable rear projection TVs will increase to a million units in 2008 from 150,000 this year, attracting the attention of content developers, said Adam Kunzman, business manager for HDTV products at Texas Instruments. Samsung and Mitsubishi have shipped 3-D-capable sets. The 3-D technology in Mitsubishi’s 73W TV was highlighted during demonstrations at Bjorn’s Audio Video in San Antonio in late September (CED Sept 27 p6). But while TI has had discussions with Microsoft about adding drivers for its 3-D-capable DLP chips to the Xbox 360 console, the software giant isn’t likely to be interested until the installed base grows, Kunzman said. A Microsoft spokeswoman declined to comment. Samsung and Mitsubishi officials have said gaining support from the videogame industry will be a key to the success of 3-D. “If it gets to one million, then maybe its of interest to them,” Kunzman said. “It’s a matter of timing and I think if the market reaches a million units, then the content community starts to get excited.”

TI also is developing a 0.65 inch, 1080p-capable version of its chip, but the timing for introducing it hasn’t been finalized, Kunzman said. In working on developing LED and laser technology for DLP-based TVs, TI hoping to stanch declining sales of rear projection sets. “I think that we see that LEDs and lasers have the opportunity to improve the fundamental brightness of the display,” he said. A brighter display coupled with (shorter) optical depth will dictate what the market share opportunity will be.”

DisplaySearch HDTV Conference Notebook…

By January CES, SiBeam will release the WirelessHD 1.0 spec (WiHD), letting the first products based on the spec to reach market by holiday 2008, said SiBeam CEO John LeMoncheck. A 0.9 version of the spec has been available to consortium founders LG, NEC, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba and SiBeam, which developed the first WiHD chips. WiHD uses millimeter-wave signals in the unlicensed 60 GHz band, sending AV content over short distances in the home at 4 Gbps. The 1.0 spec will have encryption, LeMoncheck said, not naming the supplier of that function. “We did not want to reinvent the wheel and wanted to use something the industry was already comfortable with, was robust and had enough usage models that could be used in a network environment,” he said. WiHD’s core will be a two-chip set, one with RF and baseband processing, the other a digital processor and more, he said. The processor has a clock speed of a “few hundred megahertz,” LeMoncheck said. The RF portion of the chipset has 36mm antennas. The chip has a “little bit” of memory for line buffers, he said. The IC design, based on a 0.13-micron process, could get a smaller geometry at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, LeMoncheck said. WiHD uses SiBeam’s beam shaping and steering technology, permitting delivery of the signal in a narrow, three to four degree beam. “The receiver is constantly monitoring the quality of the data it’s getting and as things start to degrade and it notices that something is about to block the channel, it searches for a better path from the source to the receiver,” LeMoncheck said. The consortium’s founding members have been designated promoters with voting rights for what’s included in the spec and the direction WiHD is headed. A group of “early adopters” each paid a $5,000 annual fee entitling them to “window for information so they have been able to track our progress,” Marketing Director Lianne Caetano said. SiBeam hasn’t identified the early adopters, which include system, chip and test gear suppliers, LeMoncheck said. The WiHD consortium, which formed committees on management, content protection and technical specs, will have a third party-run center to test for compliance and run the logo program, LeMoncheck said. SiBeam was founded in 2004 with technology developed at the Berkeley Wireless Research Center.

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HDMI Licensing expects a formal unveiling of branding guidelines next week, better defining features accompanying HDMI 1.3, HDMI Evangelist Joseph Lee said. Sony licensed its x.v.Color mark to HDMI members for describing the enhanced color depth available with 1.3; high-bit rate audio requires Dolby True HD and DTS Master Audio. “Companies won’t be able to give the version number without listing the features and saying what they are,” said Steve Venuti, vice president of marketing. “The features are all the same so they will have a consistent terminology and have technical minimum requirements.” HDMI is entering PC monitors, largely in the 1.2 version, since PC operating systems can’t handle 1.3’s deep color enhancement, Lee said. “Because of the way the OS is written in the layers, the color is RGB 8-bit,” Lee said. “I've heard that OEMs are interested in getting their monitors to be deep color, but they need to fix the OS problem first.” Discussions are underway to enable PC operating systems to handle deep color, Lee said. HDMI likely will be extended to digital media players and cellphones next year, albeit in the 1.2 version, since those products won’t require 1.3’s 10 Gbps rate, Lee said.

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Cox Communications will begin testing switched video on one or two channels of its systems in southern Orange County and Palos Verdes, Calif., in early 2008, said Thomas Leone, regional vice president and general manager. If successful, the effort will encourage more use of Motorola set-top boxes, he said. Switched video more efficiently sends digital video using compression, freeing bandwidth. Conventional hybrid fiber-coaxial systems carry all video channels from a central office to a fiber optic node and then to each home, but in a switched video system unwatched channels need not be sent. “It’s going to be done by blocks and we'll do a small test first,” Leone said. “If it works well, we'll expand it. If it works we'll use it as much as we can because it provides more bandwidth.” Cox has 250,000 Orange County subscribers, 30,000 in Palos Verdes. The Cox system, about 60 percent complete on an upgrade of its system to 1 GHz transmission, expects to finish it by September 2008, Leone said. It began the upgrade in late 2006, he said. NBC Universal and the Orange County/Palos Verdes Cox system also launched a free on-demand service for five of NBC’s primetime shows including 30 Rock, Bionic Woman, Friday Night Lights, Las Vegas and Life. The programs are typically available on demand to Cox digital subscribers by 11 a.m. the day after airing in prime time on NBC, Leone said. - Mark Seavy