TiVo has long been the poster child for how difficult it is to sell subscription products at retail. While its monthly service plans may have initially been conceived to be friendly to cable providers, they overwhelmingly balked and instead devised their own generic solutions. These often had inferior user interfaces, but were tightly integrated with cable services such as VOD that TiVo could not accommodate, even by using CableCARD. TiVo didn’t help its cause by offering the popular lifetime subscription lump sum, then discontinuing it, then reinstating it after facing competition from Digeo’s Moxi.
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At DisplaySearch’s USFPD conference, the sun-drenched beachfront of San Diego was an appropriate setting for my panel that included representatives from two companies working on energy-efficient displays that excel at outdoor readability.
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This week brought news that Walmart has purchased Vudu, a one-time on-demand video device company that transformed its business to servicing connected TVs and Blu-ray players. As the largest seller of packaged home video in the country and one of the largest sellers of consumer electronics, Walmart clearly has an interest in maintaining its position as more video is consumed digitally, but also in establishing ties to the televisions and Blu-ray players that are featuring the Vudu service.
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Last weekend I hit the slopes for the first time in about 20 years (gasp!) and for the first time with my husband and “tweenaged” son. So across the span of the last three decades (gasp again!) I haven’t had the chance to get excited, frustrated, inspired, or perplexed about using a digital camera with thick gloves, 2 ski poles, a head cold, and a ghastly sense of balance…until now.
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At the iPad unveiling in San Francisco, Steve Jobs announced a milestone for the company he co-founded in 1976. Apple has turned 50… billion dollars in annual revenue. And to kick off its next growth opportunity, its super sized iPod seeks to fill the gap between the smartphone and laptop, a gap that has become an abyss for many.
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Apple just finished introducing their latest product; the iPad. Small, slick, typically great looking, and well priced at $499 it is an interesting, but ultimately not breakthrough device. In fact it reminds one very much of a netbook. A companion device to your main computer (or iPod in this case) that allows you to have a more focused web experience and a more media-centric device at a lower price, which is much of what the netbook is evolving towards.
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Given all the outlandish rumors circulating around Apple’s forthcoming announcement on Wednesday, you probably wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the purported Apple tablet can become transparent and levitate. Indeed, it is otherwise difficult to explain how the device was able to hover above the CES show floor, invisible to everyone’s eyes but prominent in everyone’s imagination.
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This year’s CES was four days of meetings, events, booth tours, and crowds as it is every year. But this year’s show was, unlike last year, imbued with a sense of optimism and opportunity that was absent in 2009. At times even the most innovative and interesting products can get lost in a sea of product demos, displays, and PR hype. And while knowing what is new and noteworthy is the first question people ask me, it is often the last thing I care about. Because, it’s not what’s on the show floor that’s always most important, it’s what ends up in consumers’ homes, sooner rather than later, that counts because that’s where the money is. And what’s new, innovative, and different at CES is often a bit away from hitting the store shelves or being relevant to a mainstream consumer.
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NPD’s Weekly Tracking Service showed consumer technology revenue for the 2009 five week holiday period was down slightly less than 1 percent, year-over-year. While that result is far from the halcyon days of the mid-decade, it is a far better performance than 2008’s 6 percent decline. The real highlight though is a tale of two categories, PCs and TVs. PC sales were as strong as we have ever seen, with notebook unit volume up almost 70 percent and desktops (yes, desktops !!!) up nearly 30 percent. TVs, on the other hand, were a drag on revenue growth despite a 30 percent increase in unit volume.
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On Monday NPD released consumer technology results to our weekly data clients for the third week of the holiday season and so far sales results are tracking at, or a little better than, our pre-holiday expectations. Prior to the holiday we expected sales dollars to fall between 0 and negative 5 percent for the holiday period. For the first two initial periods we reported on, November sales and Black Friday week sales, revenue has been slightly stronger. With November monthly sales rising less than 1 percent from 2008 due to the strength of sales early in the month, and Black Friday sales falling just 1.2 percent, the trend line has been favoring a closer to flat holiday than our worst case negative expectation.
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Consumer Technology | Ross Rubin, Executive Director, Industry Analysis | 
March 15, 2010 1:53 pm | 
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