Sony & Disney Partner to Promote 3D – Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment and Sony Electronics are partnering for consumer and retails education, promotion and marketing of in-home 3D devices and content. Things get underway with release of the box-office hit Alice in Wonderland this fall (although that film was a post-production 3D conversion – not shot originally in 3D). Disney helped start the DVD/Blu-ray combo pack in 2008 as well as digital copies with all BD releases. Disney will bundle the film with ten of their 3D Bravia HD models during the holiday retail season. Other studios and consumer electronics companies are eying the upcoming holiday season for a major 3DTV push, including 3D-compatible Blu-ray players and glasses. (Alice in Wonderland remains this year’s No. 2 domestic box office earner, with more than one billion dollars income globally.) Panasonic is to partner with Fox Home Entertainment for the 3D Blu-ray release of Avatar in December, and Samsung is collaborating with DreamWorks to bundle How to Train Your Dragon and some of the Shrek movies with 3DTVs this fall.
LG Aims to Raise LCD Sales 40% Next Year – LG Electronics Inc., who are the second-largest maker of liquid-crystal-display TVs, plans to increase their LCD TV sales by 40% next year as lower prices boost demand. They aim to sell 35 million LCD TVs, compared to the 25 million for this year. Sales including plasma TVs may reach 40 million sets next year from 29 million this year. Retails prices of TVs are likely fall further, in line with declining LCD panel prices, bolstering consumer demand. Sales of LCD TVs with LEDs as screen backlights account for about 20% of LG’s total LCD TV sales now but are expected to rise to about 60% next year. Due to the loss of its hand-set business, the Seoul-based company announced in July that its operating profit fell 90%.
Philips and Broadcom Partner to Offer Bluetooth Remotes – Broadcom will apply its Bluetooth and other technologies to Philips’ remotes so they can be used to control home entertainment system via subtle movements – using gestural technology on a touchpad. The companies said this approach will become more important as more HDTVs and Blu-ray players connect to the Internet. The trend is going from passive devices to more dynamic connected portals for entertainment, communication and more. So the remote control is changing to accommodate the breadth of the new features becoming available. There will also be Bluetooth-enabled 3D shutter glasses and voice-over-Internet protocol applications such as Skype.
At the same time Philips Home Control has partnered with Oregan Networks to unveil a new motion-sensing remote – Onyx Dual. It is designed to facilitate an easy text input method for on-screen search menus, using profile settings and social networking apps. Oregan, who develop browsing technologies for Internet TV, feel the new gadget is an essential CE peripheral making interactive Web TV and content browsing experience compelling and accessible to a wide audience of users with differing levels of technology adoption. The Onyx Dual control enables traditional interface navigation via motion-sensing technology responding to kinetic hand signals, plus it functions as an intelligent, context-sensitive keyboard activated by the simple gesture of turning the device.
