By Paul Gagnon – Director, North American TV Research
Blogging Live from SID Display Week!
We had a very lively discussion today during the final session of the SID Business Conference, which covered the largest display application market: TVs. Panelists and even audience members jousted about future viability and past mistakes.
Panelists in the session included representatives from advocacy organizations covering all three flat panel TV technologies currently in the marketplace. Barry Young represented the OLED faction, Bruce Berkoff fought for the LCD point of view, while Jim Palumbo stood behind plasma. All three brought up great arguments to defend their technologies current or expected position in the marketplace; however, we ran short of time to fully explore the subject of achieving marketplace success and what barriers any new technology will face when going from concept to commercialization.
So I’ll pose three questions here for the masses of our readers to answer or comment on:
New technologies will nearly always require some type of marketplace premium during introduction, but what’s the limit?
Pioneer was a premium plasma TV brand, but maybe too premium and it cost them market share, ultimately proving unsustainable. What about OLED? Will consumers accept a 20-30% premium and can the technology even get to a 20-30% premium in a reasonable amount of time? What about LED backlit LCD TVs? Currently they are priced at a 40-50% premium, but is that narrow enough to encourage adoption? Much is made about new technologies, but consumers are moving towards more price sensitivity… not less.
The marketing battle over specs is getting out of hand. As nearly all on the panel agreed, Samsung’s marketing of LED backlit LCD TVs as “LED TVs” just adds to consumer confusion over technology. Confusing, inconsistent and absurd contrast measurements (1 million:1, 2 million:1??) that consumers can barely perceive, let along understand, are leading manufacturers to a spec “arms race.” When will the industry stop?
We seem to have reached limits of human visual perception, so claims (many theoretical rather than measured) of increased performance will meet with consumer skepticism, ultimately harming credibility. Maybe we are just biding our time until substantial and meaningful improvements in utility can become the marketing focus rather than one-upsmanship in specs.
Which advancements in TV technology do consumers really value, and which are fluff? I’ll start. Admittedly, I remain a skeptic of ultra-thin TVs. Consumers embraced the form factor shift from CRT to flat panels, but I’m not sure how highly they value going from flat to flatter, especially at the premiums being charged. Now, most of these ultra-thin sets bundle other advanced features, but I think the ultra-thin premium is not as high as manufacturers think it should be. Hitachi’s ultra-thin sets were a failure in the US when the premium became too high. Do consumers gain utility or performance benefits from thin sets? No, just more attractive cabinet designs, which probably carries a low premium.
