Industry pundit Pete Putman weighed on the recent OEM agreement between TCL and Sony:

Well, I predicted this would happen...over 15 years ago. As the Japanese TV market slowly collapsed, egged on by the Great Recession, once-famous brands like Panasonic, Pioneer, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, and JVC either (a) stopped manufacturing TVs altogether and left the business, (b) OEM'ed televisions from Korean manufacturers (Samsung, LG) and Chinese manufacturers (TCL, Hisense, et al) and "private labeled" them, or (c) Washed their hands of the manufacturing end, but licensed their brands to Korean and Chinese manufacturers.

Profit margins on televisions plummeted over the past decade.

Both Samsung and LG were getting ready to shut down their LCD panel manufacturing facilities before the pandemic, but a surge in demand for everything from TVs to laptops and tablets kept those fabs open. Now, even the Korean giants shop in China for wholesale LCD panels and even finished TVs, with only LG's WRGB OLED fabs and Samsung's RGB OLED materials manufacturing still in operation.

Sony bragged for decades that they manufactured everything in the television chain, from cameras to TV screens. But even Sony was shopping for panels in the Chinese wholesale marketplace like everyone else. And their market share continues to slide year-over-year, with Samsung, TCL, Hisense, and LG together commanding over 90% of worldwide TV shipments.

Considering that 65-inch LCD panels for televisions can be bought for about $100 apiece (or less!) on the wholesale market (and TCL is one of the largest LCD panel manufacturers)—and you can buy an 4K 85-inch LCD TV for about $700 at BJ's and Costco—this deal was probably inevitable. Sony is slowly getting out of a lot of hardware businesses like laptops and audio gear. (They still are, by far, the world's biggest manufacturer of camera sensors, a very profitable business.)

The Bravia TV business was losing money 15 years ago and was spun off into a separate company from Sony Corporation because of that. I would not be surprised to see Sony eventually exit the TV manufacturing biz entirely, along with consumer audio, and just license their brand to a OEM company, like Hitachi, Toshiba, and JVC have done.

It's hard for some Japanese companies to admit when they've lost, but that's just the brutal economics of the TV biz nowadays. (And to think that 45+ years ago, we were still building and selling televisions in the U.S.!)

PALM SPRINGS, CALIF.—This year’s HPA Tech Retreat will once again see a gathering of industry-leading thinkers who will discuss the latest trends in the creation, management and dissemination of video content. The weeklong Palm Springs event, which is capped at just 700 attendees and begins Monday, Feb. 11, will feature a main conference program, the “TR-X Tech Retreat Xtra” focused on eSports, as well as breakfast roundtables and a curated innovation zone, along with other opportunities for industry leaders to meet and exchange ideas.

The event officially gets underway with the Tuesday Supersession, which will highlight Next-Gen Workflows and Infrastructure, featuring insight from Tom Graham of Dolby on Dolby Vision from set to consumer; Tina Eckman of Dolby on Dolby Atmos from set to consumer; and Scott Kramer of Netflix on immersive sound from capture through post production.

HDR AND THE MOVE TO 8K

Numerous sessions on Wednesday including an HDR “Mini” Session, will address the importance of HDR in video production. There will be an introduction to HDR, how it is being used in anime and how it can push the limits of motion in video production. These sessions should highlight how 4K and UHD are not interchangeable terms, and that resolution is just part of the picture with HDR playing an important role in UHD, according to HPA president Seth Hallen, who will host the “Intro to HDR” session.

“UHD implies not only resolution, but other things such as HDR and its wider color gamut,” said Hallen, who is also head of global strategy and business development at Pixelogic. “Studies have shown that the human brain can detect a greater range of light to dark than it can picture resolution. HDR thus is a massive improvement for overall picture quality. But it can also ensure that the content is delivered as closely as possible to the filmmaker’s intent. Hopefully the consumer will appreciate that.”

None of that is to say that resolution isn’t important, and even as 4K content is only now starting to pick up steam the industry is clearly looking ahead to what the next generation—8K—can offer. Pete Putman of ROAM Consulting will host two sessions, as well as take part in a breakfast roundtable—firstly offering his thoughts on HDMI 2.1 and Display-Port before providing an overview of products in the world of consumer electronics that were introduced at the recent 2019 CES in Las Vegas. Putman will then dive into what we can expect in 8K in 2019 and beyond in the session, “8K: Whoa! How’d We Get There So Quickly?”

“The 8K talk will be an overview of everything from cameras to displays, based on current information,” said Putman, who will discuss various aspects of the technology including appropriate codecs for compression and data transfer rates. “It should bring people up to speed on just how fast 8K is coming to market.”

TAKING IT ON THE ROAD AND BRINGING IT HOME

Mark Chiolis, director of business development for the Mobile TV Group will host Thursday’s “Remote and Mobile Production Panel,” which will discuss the changing world of remote production that now includes not only live sports and concerts for broadcasters, but addresses how this is fitting into the world of streaming services and the growing eGames/eSports market.

“With so many live events you start out with a blank canvas and the set up for a production crew is very tight,” said Chiolis. “We’ll discuss the whole gamut of what is involved in preparing for a live production and what we’ve seen come out in 2018 and what we expect to help with productions in the next couple of years. Part of the discussion will include the role of REMI applications [REMote Integration], IP workflows, virtual productions and of course, eSports. It should be an exciting time for live production.”

Thanks to larger TV screens with greater resolution joined by surround sound systems, seeing movies at home has gotten closer to what filmmakers have intended, and this aspect of what the viewer actually sees will be discussed in “Downstream Image Presentation Management for Consumer Displays.” Moderated by Michael Chambliss of International Cinematographers Guild, the session will feature Steven Poster of the American Society of Cinematographers as a panelist.

“We, as the ASC, started participating at the HPA Tech Retreat seven years ago, and at the time we were asked why we were here,” said Poster. “Now they have asked us to give our presentation, which we see as important as it discusses the importance of the creative intent of the filmmaker.”

That intent of what the director and cinematographer has improved a lot from the days when movies were in essence “butchered” via pan and scan, but today even with HDR and greater picture resolution, there still needs to be more progress. Poster, who first formed a technology committee when he was ASC president 20 years ago, had a vision whereby the TV set could ensure that the picture is up to the standards of the filmmaker. However, he admitted that the technology wasn’t quite there at the time.

Now two and a half decades later that is finally becoming a reality.

“Our TV set technology has become quite good,” said Chambliss. “So why can’t we have a little bit of metadata that is used in the production making it way to the sets. So far Netflix and Sony have implemented what is called calibrated modes so that the set closely mirrors the monitors we used in the production. Instead of leaving this in a 1950s ‘it is up to the viewer to adjust the set,’ the smart TVs could optimize the picture. The sets are capable of doing this, so let’s automate the process.”

CAPTIONING AND SUBTITLES

Subtitling and captioning will get its moment in the spotlight at the Retreat with “IMSC 1.1: A Single Subtitle and Caption Format for the Entertainment Chain,” hosted by Pierre-Anthony Lemieux of Sandflow Consulting.

Lemieux will highlight IMSC, the W3C standard for worldwide subtitles/captions, which came about as the result of an international collaboration—the initial version of which was published in 2016.

“Technology has made it possible, along with flexible delivery for subtitles and captions to be provided in so much more content,” said Lemieux. “It has been in the broadcast world where the United States was the exception for providing subtitles for the hearing impaired, but worldwide there have been little mandates for accessibility. But that is changing.”

In addition, thanks to streaming services—notably Netflix, which provides content from international markets—as well as changing viewing habits, subtitles and captions are becoming much more important.

“Even people that aren’t hard of hearing are enjoying content in bed late at night or on buses and airplanes and having the sound on isn’t an option, so captions are necessary for the message to be conveyed,” added Lemieux. “It is easy to forget that just 10 years ago subtitles were literally burned on a film with a laser in France, and that was an expensive and difficult process. Today technology—notably IMSC—has made it easy for subtitles to be added to the content. Subtitles and captions were an afterthought, but now in the world of audio/video production these will be first class citizens.”

Predicting everything that attendees will see would be akin to looking into the future, said Mark Schubin, program chair at the HPA. “There’s a wild array of possibilities on both the acquisition and presentation ends. How do we deal with the new world?”

For more information, visithpaonline.

LAS VEGAS—I attend more than a few trade shows every year, but there’s nothing like the Consumer Electronics Show (which has been known as CES and ICES over the years). Each January, more than 150,000 people pack into the Las Vegas Convention Center, Sands Expo Center, and a bunch of hotels and meeting places to see the latest gadgets and technologies.

Some will turn out to be gamechangers. Others will flourish briefly; then fade away. And more than a few will just turn out to be a complete bust with their backers fading into obscurity months later.

A TAME SHOW
In the past decade, there have been a few highly-anticipated shows. At the 2009 event, it was 3D everywhere, every place, on everything. In 2010, tablets were all the rage—that is, until more than 80 of them were put out for inspection. In 2014 and 2015, it was 4K (UHD) TV, and last year, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) ruled the roost, along with electric cars and flexible displays.

Samsung claims its new line of Q-LED quantum dot-based UHDTVs can hit a small area peak brightness of 2,000 cd/m2.
Photo by Pete Putman

In contrast, this year’s show was almost tame by comparison. It’s almost as if everyone decided we needed a break from the “boom-to-bust” hype cycles that characterized earlier years, and simply “phoned it in.” That is, there were very few significant breakthroughs at the show, with just about all of those exhibited privately off the floor.

There were a few dominant themes this time around, especially in the world of televisions and displays. Given how quickly Ultra HDTV has come into the market and how quickly retail prices have fallen—as of this writing just before the Super Bowl, it was possible to buy a Tier 1 55-inch Ultra HD set for $499—there wasn’t much chatter about 4K.

But there was quite a bit about high dynamic range and quantum dots (QD). For those who don’t know, QDs are tiny nanoparticles that exhibit a quantum energy effect when bombarded with intense light and emit very pure and stable colors. UHDTVs equipped with quantum dots use an array of blue light-emitting diodes (LED) and a special optical film impregnated with red and green QDs.

The results can be spectacular. Samsung, which currently holds almost 40 percent of the worldwide market share for UHDTVs, announced a new line of QD TVs at the show called Q-LEDs, and they claim these sets can hit a small area peak brightness of 2,000 cd/m2. Hisense and TCL—two Chinese brands building a reputation in the U.S. market—also showed QD UHDTVs with high dynamic range and a much wider gamut of colors than we’re used to with the older ITU BT.709 color space.

LG, the number two brand in UHDTVs, countered with an array of large organic light-emitting diode (OLED) UHDTVs that can also reproduce HDR signals, although their small area peak brightness readings are a bit lower at 800 cd/m2. Although LG’s subsidiary LG Display manufactures both LCD and OLED panels (and supposedly will sell them to Samsung), the parent company is betting the farm on OLED TV sales for now. And a new enhancement known as “Nano Cell” was shown by LGD in their suite as a way to produce more intense and pure wavelengths of color light for LCDs.

Sony maintains a number 3-4 ranking in UHDTV shipments and surprised more than a few people by showing 65-inch and 77-inch OLED UHDTVs in Las Vegas. These new Bravia models use the same OLED panels manufactured by LG Display, but with Sony’s video processing “secret sauce” thrown in. And the company continues to show HDR and WCG in large 4K LCD TVs, along with their spectacular modular CLEDIS micro LED display wall that made its debut at InfoComm last year.

Not far away, Panasonic continued to baffle many of us in the trade press by unveiling four new UHD Blu-ray players, sans any accompanying Ultra HDTVs in the U.S. market. (The company continues to sell a 65-inch OLED 4K set in Canada and Europe.) The four new players are considered to be “entry level” UHD models, with the main difference being the absence of WiFi connections on two of them. Who wouldn’t want WiFi on a BD player?

At CES, the HDMI Forum announced v2.1 of the connector, boosting data rates to a mind-boggling 48 Gbps.
Photo by Pete Putman

A handful of companies (mostly Chinese) showed 8K TV demos, but the buzz just wasn’t around them this year. Given that all of the 8K TVs shown to date either use a 98-inch LG Display or 98-inch Innolux LCD panel, there’s not much shock and awe to be had when you see them. LG Display also took the wraps off a 65-inch 8K LCD TV in their suite, while Hisense had a demo of HDR on 4K vs. 8K sets, using static images for comparison and sort of defeating the purpose.

Interfacing all of this stuff becomes problematic when you consider that an Ultra HD signal refreshed 60 times per second with 10-bit RGB color or 12-bit 4:2:0 color requires a data rate in excess of 20 Gbps! So it was somewhat big news when the HDMI Forum announced v2.1 of the connector, boosting data rates to a mindboggling 48 Gbps. (Can you say “fiber-optic cables?”) Not far away, VESA exhibited demos of 4K/120 and HDR using Display- Port version 1.4, alongside Display Stream Compression 1.2. The once-ballyhooed superMHL format, meanwhile, was conspicuous by its absence.

THE REALITY OF VR AND AR
And what of VR and AR? Most of what was shown in this category focused around reducing the size and weight of headgear, which is enough to put many users off the format altogether. Perhaps a significant breakthrough was achieved by semiconductor manufacturer Kopin, who unveiled a slick 2048x2048 color OLED imaging panel that was placed in a firefighter’s oxygen mask to work as an AR infrared detector, locating people during search-and rescue missions. It has great promise for near-to-eye VR displays, too.

Cutting the cord (no, not that kind of cord) has been the dream of numerous chip manufacturers. This year, Canadian fabless semiconductor company Peraso had several impressive demonstrations of 60 GHz wireless USB 3.0 moving a 220 MB movie file through a modified 802.11ad WiFi router, from one laptop to another using a 2 GHz wireless channel, in just seconds. And Keyssa demonstrated a wireless docking DisplayPort cradle that streamed 1080p/60 content from an Amazon tablet to a TV without a hiccup.

I’ve just scratched the surface of this year’s show and will have a more detailed CES recap at the upcoming HPA Technology Retreat in late February. See you there?

LAS VEGAS—TV Technology asked a cross-section of NAB Show-goers a series of five questions regarding what they considered the main themes, evidence of those, whether or not these initiatives will take hold, and what promising technologies from past NAB Shows did not see daylight. (A complete list of quotes from respondents and links to their full 5Qs is at “NAB 2016 in 21 Quotes.”)

Pete Putman, president of ROAM Consulting:
Q1.How many NAB Shows have you attended?
P. P. This is No. 22, I think.

Q2.What, in your opinion, were the main themes of the show this year?
P. P. UHD, IP infrastructure, drones (they’ve already become annoying), advances in encoding (H.264, H.265), not so much display except for HDR and some WCG [high dynamic range and wide color gamut].

Q3.What were some examples of these themes?
P.P. Walk by the Fuji, Deluxe, and other booths and you see “4K! UHD!” plastered all over the signage. Hitachi and others showed HDR cameras. Lots of encoding demos with HDR. Probably the best encoding demo was Fraunhofer—Ultra HD with 10-bit HDR, 60 Hz, at 16 MB/s CBR. Samsung showed their tone-mapping HDR algorithm which they’ve submitted to NAB as a candidate for SMPTE 2094 and they’ll make it available royalty and license-free.

Q4.Do you foresee any or all of these technologies or initiatives taking hold?
P.P. Yep. I’d expect to see more H.265 hardware-based encoders and decoders come to market. Still costly to implement. Saw two nice 55-inch OLEDs for broadcast and monitoring applications. I expect to see more as LG Display ramps up production. (Tip: Keep an eye on Sony’s TV line next January.)

Q5.What technology that impressed you most at a past show didn’t see the light of day?
P.P. Can’t remember, but I’m sure there were a few. Probably Canon’s SED display, which still looks better than any OLED display. But legal issues, costs, and licensing problems killed it.

INDIAN WELLS CALIF.—As a matter of street cred,Pete Putman launched his annual Consumer Electronics Show Review at the HPA Technology Retreat with a slide of his old Heathkit Crystal Receiver Model CR-1 that still works.

Putman then reviewed the price points of TVs, which are all over the board, but tumbling in general. In 1995, a 50-inch 720p plasma costs $50,000. It would now be had for less than one-tenth of that.

Putman said 170,000-plus people attended CES, including 3,600 companies exhibited on 2.47 million square feet of floor space. Sharp TVs, once renowned for its RGBY pixels is no more. Hisense owns the brand. Panasonic, Putman said, had a single TV on the floor. LG is pressing forward with organic light-emitting diode, or OLED, TVs, in part because it scored the Kodak patent for white OLEDs, which overcome the dreaded phenomenon of the dying blue OLEDs that have plagued the displays from their inception.

Virtual reality was big, as was augmented reality. Putman showed a slide of the line at the Oculus Rift booth that looked like Walmart on black Friday. It was long.

So Putman kept up the TV tour, which included 8KTVs and a screen that’s really too big to be believed. LG had a 98-inch 8KTV; Samsung had a curved 8K LCD, and Konka and Hisense had 8KTVs.

But it was Samsung that showed the “world’s largest” 170-inch TV. Putman said he didn’t know of another 170-inch TV that was not the world’s largest.

“You stood there long enough, you get a nice tan from it,” he said.

One display exhibit that caught Putman’s eye comprised four 65-inch curved OLED panels together, displaying different scenes on both sides.

With regard to high-dynamic range, the route to provision is turning into a maze, but the goal is clear enough on the display side. Just as there were a lot of high-definition TVs in the market long before there was high-definition TV, HDR sets are hitting the floor.

Changhong, one of the many Chinese TV makers, was showing 4K HDR OLEDs, Putman said. Samsung demonstrated 4K HDR over the air, if you could find it, Putman said. LG had a 4K HDR LCD, and Sony had a 4KTV with wide color gamut.

Samsung announced a UHD HDR BluRay player for $350. Panasonic also showed one but did not name a price.
Lenovo showed the Yoga X1 with an 14-inch OLED screen, with three USB Type 3 connectors, important for hooking up things that aren’t here yet but coming, Putman said.

There were also transparent displays and quantum dot displays. QD Vision demonstrated that quantum dot backlighting is more power efficient than LCD, the technology is still contains cadmium, which is pretty nasty to the human body.

Putman said the coolest thing he saw was a rollable OLED display from LG showing video. Sony first showed a tiny rollable OLED in 2010. Putman describe LG’s 18-incher as “too cool for words.”

Putman talked about the superMHL interface for mobile devices for delivery of video up to 8K resolution. He mentioned 60 GHz connectivity, and said 802.11ad Wi-Fi is here with the support of Qualcomm. He called it “Wi-Fi with rocket boosters.”

Also see Pete’s coverage atHDExpert.com.

LAS VEGAS by way of PHILLY—Every year, Pete Putman goes to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and all his followers get are absolutely great photographs and a highly informed perspective. For the 2016 event, Putman captured images of the LG OLED wall, TCL’s warehouse-sized booth, the Innolux 8K LCD, Samsung’s 170-inch 4K LCD and many more. He provides the update on wired and wireless interfaces, as well as retro technology resurrected for the show. And then there was the sweets section...

“LG Display invites a few journalists up to what we call the ‘candy store’ to see the latest in display technology. And this year didn’t disappoint: How about dual-side 55-inch flexible OLED TVs just millimeters thick? Or a 25-inch waterfall (curved) display that could form the entire center console in a car, with flexible OLEDs in the dashboard creating bright, colorful, and contrasty gauges?”

See Pete’s complete coverage at HDTVExpert.com.