Westinghouse Vows It Won’t Compete in Lowball Ultra HD Space
CE makers’ fears, as voiced last week at CE Week’s Ultra HD Conference (CED June 28 p1), that lowball-priced 4K sets this holiday selling season will create confusing “mixed messaging” for consumers and hurt the industry, are “much ado about nothing,” Rey Roque, vice president-marketing at Westinghouse Digital, told us. Westinghouse is targeting a $12,000 price point for its 84-inch Ultra HD 4K TV, with a 65-inch model to reach market at a projected $5,999 tag, Roque said. Westinghouse expects to begin shipping its Ultra HD products in August, he said.
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In 1080p sets today, “you have a wide range of price points,” but little consumer confusion or mixed messaging as a result of that wide range, Roque said. A friend phoned him recently to say he saw Westinghouse TVs being merchandised at 99 cents each, Roque said. “That’s not what the cost was, so retailers are going to play that game with 1080p,” and Ultra HD likely will be no different, he said. A California-based chain, 99 Cents Only Stores, customarily has trumpeted the opening of a new outlet by offering Westinghouse 40-inch TVs for 99 cents to each of the first nine customers in line, as it did for a Sacramento store opening on May 30 (http://bit.ly/128P9lR). Roque doesn’t worry that a range of Ultra HD TVs coming to market at a wide diversity of pricing points will stump shoppers, he said: “The consumer’s not as dumb as we think."
Several name-brand TV makers said at the conference they plan to differentiate their Ultra HD sets from lowball competitors by building their messaging around the high quality of upscalers that will be built into their 4K models. Westinghouse hasn’t yet nailed down its Ultra HD messaging, but is “working on a reasonably high-quality upscaler, because we've entered the commercial markets,” Roque said. “And in that sense, we need an upscaler that can compete in that environment. Are we going to port that into the consumer piece? It really depends on where the set is going to be priced. We're really looking more at specialty retailers for our 4K, which would then mean higher demand for image quality than there would be perhaps at the mass merchant."
Asked whether he expects problems landing fourth-quarter retail placements for Westinghouse Ultra HD products, Roque said: “Until we release in August, I won’t be able to answer that question. But there has been interest.” Currently, most of the “push” at Westinghouse is in 1080p sets, “in terms of what we want to push for the holiday,” he said, suggesting that Ultra HD for now isn’t the company’s highest supply-chain priority. “It’s a dollars and cents issue,” he said of the company’s 1080p priorities.
Image quality is why Westinghouse won’t compete in the lowball Ultra HD space, Roque said. One reason why Westinghouse has delayed the introduction of its 4K TVs is that “we find that the chipsets in the value space really don’t have the bandwidth to do the internal processing for 2K to 4K,” Roque said. “They downconvert the input, then upconvert again. We don’t want to play that game. So we believe some of these low-level price points are related to prematurely jumping in and using chipsets that aren’t meant for 2K-to-4K passthrough."
Roque scoffed at supplier executives who promise through “upgrade paths” that their companies won’t hang early adopters out to dry for buying first-generation sets that lack HDMI 2.0, H.265, or other soon-to-be-finalized improvements. “Absolutely not!” Roque snapped when asked if Westinghouse will offer any such upgrade paths. “We believe consumers adopt technology at a certain point, and re-adopt, and re-adopt,” Roque said. For a consumer who buys a first-generation Ultra HD TV with its maximum rate of 30 frames per second at 4K, but wants the 60 frames per second that HDMI 2.0 will enable, Roque’s advice is to “buy a new set” once HDMI 2.0 technology finally does come embedded in future products, he said. “That’s the way it’s been for 30 years, so no upgrade path.”