Consumer Upgrade and the DTV Transition

By Vish Nayak, Vice President of Digital TV and Panel Electronics

The transition from analog to digital TV is in full swing, and prices of HDTVs have fallen due to aggressive price
competition and a corresponding decline in set pricing. This has unleashed a torrent of demand by consumers who want to upgrade to a HDTV set. This demand has also been stoked by various HDTV set OEMs each trying to grab market share, with major players jockeying for dominant market share position by betting on a key display technology that HDTV OEMs believe will be the winner in the market place (e.g. Sony and Samsung on LCD TVs, and Panasonic and Pioneer on plasma TVs). Most industry analysts and pundits believe that a typical price point that a typical mainstream consumer can afford or is willing to buy a HDTV should be less than $800.

Clearly consumers are feeling a force moving them towards taking the HDTV plunge, goaded on by ogling of warehouse shelves of large screen TVs at big club retailers like Costco, Wal-Mart or Sam’s Club. They are being bombarded by new technology marketing messages urging them to embrace it and not missing out on having a personal HDTV experience. Consumers are finally being enticed to plunk down cold hard cash, seduced by all the biz buzz and expecting to be satiated by the benefits of owning large screen flat panel HDTVs.

With a proliferation of new technologies to deal with and its attendant upgrade headaches, as well as comprehending current DVD format wars and relevant expensive new hardware platforms needed to source HD based content to a Digital TV, I am a little concerned that we in the HDTV industry are not setting realistic expectations towards the DTV transition. More consumer education would allow the harried and potential upgrade consumer to embark on a significant entertainment/‌info eco-system upgrade that is seamless and painless from the consumer’s perspective. The industry needs to make extra efforts to address consumer confusion by communicating benefits that will be achieved by making the upgrade now rather than later.

The industry has made it easier for the consumer to replace their legacy analog CRT based and projection TV sets with state-of-the-art flat panel LCD or plasma HDTVs. It’s easy to see how upgrading to a HDTV set would bring substantial improvements to picture video quality by exploiting advances in semiconductor processing and panel technologies to achieve a cinema-like picture right in their living rooms and in enhancing their HDTV experience with realistic, immersive sound that can be achieved with improved digital audio processing techniques in the newer HD Surround Sound standards like Dolby HD or DTS-HD.

The battle between all these options and technology choices in upgrading to an HDTV-based system may eventually be decided by consumer evaluations of
• entertainment budget economics (cost of use)
• aesthetics of adding an HDTV into existing furniture and room interior designs
• ability to position the HDTV as a display appliance fed by disparate content sources that can be connected easily
Finally, the on-going continuous improvement in audio and video quality brought on by newer technologies waiting in the wings like OLED displays may change the HDTV upgrade landscape in the future.

A powerful future consumer demand will be “No New Wires” connectivity. These will be a trend for towards wireless hook-ups between the display and content platforms. This will serve to eliminate time, materials and dollars required to tearing up theater room walls to lay cable required for multi-channel sound sources, as well as current wired audio/video digital cabling solutions like HDMI. Witness the growth of the panel and associated cabling installation industry, which has ridden the growth of the HDTV industry, trying to make the upgrade process as painless as possible at this juncture.

All of these issues need to be coherently tackled by the HDTV set industry and its associated peripheral platform makers to make the consumer a happy rider on the HDTV band-wagon.

This leads me to wonder: Are the HDTV set industry and the content platform industry rising to the challenge that would allow consumers to do a seamless, painless upgrade of their HDTV watching experience, without setting up unrealistic expectations that cannot be met by the transition to HDTV?

Would like to hear your comments….