Sony racing to beat Apple to next-generation of connected TV sets
Sony CEO Howard Stringer said Thursday that he has "no doubt" that the late Steve Jobs was working to reinvent the television, while the company has spent the past five years developing a platform to compete against Jobs and Apple.
During a breakfast hosted and reported by The Wall Street Journal, Stringer acknowledged that the television industry can't continue on its current path.
"We can't continue selling TV sets [the way we have been]. Every TV set we all make loses money," he said.
Sony warned last week that it may lose as much as $1 billion this fiscal year, largely due to the company's bleeding television business, which has lost money for seven straight years.
The executive went on to note that there's a "tremendous amount of R&D going into a different kind of TV set." For his part, Jobs revealed to his biographer that he had "cracked" the secret for a simple and elegant interface for an Apple-style television set.
Stringer said he has "no doubt" that Jobs was working on a new kind of TV, adding, "that's what we're all looking for."
The Journal noted Stringer as saying that he "wouldn't underestimate Apple's ability to come up with a novel concept, but he noted it is a tricky process." He added that any transition to a new kind of television would "take a long time."
Sony threw its lot in with the Google TV platform last year, but saw little success. Google recently released a major update to the platform in hopes of revitalizing interest in it.
However, Google's partners may be hesitant to work with the platform again. Logitech CEO Guerrino De Luca said earlier this week that his company had decided to sit "on the bench" about the platform after taking a costly $100 million loss on its Google TV-equipped Revue, due to "a mistake of implementation of a gigantic nature," The Verge reports.
Sony also bet big on 3D TV sets, but has yet to see widespread consumer adoption. Stringer on Thursday attributed the lack of regular TV content as a cause for slow sales of the devices.
"I spent the last five years building a platform so I can compete against Steve Jobs," he said after admitting that the iPhone is "really well organized." That platform is "finished, and it's launching now," Stringer continued.
The company's strategy is described as a "four-screen" approach for mobile phones, tablets, personal computers and televisions. Stringer indicated Thursday that he intends to stick to that strategy, despite calls for his resignation from some shareholders.
As for tablets, Sony released its first tablets this fall, more than a year after Apple launched the iPad. Despite having innovative form factors, the devices received a chilly reception from analysts and bloggers.
The executive characterized 2011 as a rough year and claimed that Sony would have been profitable except for several disasters, including an earthquake and tsunami in Japan in March, a hacking attack on the company's PlayStation Online service and recent flooding in Thailand. According to him, those events cost the company as much as $3 billion this year.
"For Sony this year, all those things are much worse than you can even characterize," he said.
During a breakfast hosted and reported by The Wall Street Journal, Stringer acknowledged that the television industry can't continue on its current path.
"We can't continue selling TV sets [the way we have been]. Every TV set we all make loses money," he said.
Sony warned last week that it may lose as much as $1 billion this fiscal year, largely due to the company's bleeding television business, which has lost money for seven straight years.
The executive went on to note that there's a "tremendous amount of R&D going into a different kind of TV set." For his part, Jobs revealed to his biographer that he had "cracked" the secret for a simple and elegant interface for an Apple-style television set.
Stringer said he has "no doubt" that Jobs was working on a new kind of TV, adding, "that's what we're all looking for."
The Journal noted Stringer as saying that he "wouldn't underestimate Apple's ability to come up with a novel concept, but he noted it is a tricky process." He added that any transition to a new kind of television would "take a long time."
Sony threw its lot in with the Google TV platform last year, but saw little success. Google recently released a major update to the platform in hopes of revitalizing interest in it.
However, Google's partners may be hesitant to work with the platform again. Logitech CEO Guerrino De Luca said earlier this week that his company had decided to sit "on the bench" about the platform after taking a costly $100 million loss on its Google TV-equipped Revue, due to "a mistake of implementation of a gigantic nature," The Verge reports.
Sony also bet big on 3D TV sets, but has yet to see widespread consumer adoption. Stringer on Thursday attributed the lack of regular TV content as a cause for slow sales of the devices.
"I spent the last five years building a platform so I can compete against Steve Jobs," he said after admitting that the iPhone is "really well organized." That platform is "finished, and it's launching now," Stringer continued.
The company's strategy is described as a "four-screen" approach for mobile phones, tablets, personal computers and televisions. Stringer indicated Thursday that he intends to stick to that strategy, despite calls for his resignation from some shareholders.
As for tablets, Sony released its first tablets this fall, more than a year after Apple launched the iPad. Despite having innovative form factors, the devices received a chilly reception from analysts and bloggers.
The executive characterized 2011 as a rough year and claimed that Sony would have been profitable except for several disasters, including an earthquake and tsunami in Japan in March, a hacking attack on the company's PlayStation Online service and recent flooding in Thailand. According to him, those events cost the company as much as $3 billion this year.
"For Sony this year, all those things are much worse than you can even characterize," he said.
Comments
Sony racing to beat Apple to next-generation of connected TV sets
I don't get it.
Sony already have a "connected" TV set, as do Samsung, Panasonic and LG. Since there is a new TV generation every year why would Sony be racing to get the next-generation of TVs out before Apple? (who haven't even announced a TV!)
It seems like a bloody weird schedule to follow. It would make a lot more sense to me if Sony just keep improving their "connected" TV and stick with whatever yearly TV refresh cycle they have at the moment.
Pushing the refresh forward and backward in the year depending on what Apple may or may-not do seems pointless.
EDIT: Sony's "4 screens" kind of reminds me of Microsoft's "3 screens and the cloud".
vs
What a bunch of BS. Sony's got nothing planned! Pretty lame trying blame all their problems on natural disasters. Apple and Samsung use much of the same components as Sony but I don't see them making execuses. As for the data security, Sony's got no one to blame but themselves.
Samsung doesn't have any plant in the Tohoku (earthquake and tsunami) and in Japan (electricity shortage)
Stringer said he has "no doubt" that Jobs was working on a new kind of TV, adding, "that's what we're all looking for."
Well, you heard it from him first. As usual, let Apple do all the R&D, then everyone else can pull a Samsung and fire up the copy machines, which will then result in the usual iHaters, trolls, and whiners claiming that Apple simply stole the idea from everyone else.
How somebody, thinking about something for 5 years and unable to even get the "basics" of what his competitor is doing figured out, can be a CEO is beyond me.
Look Stringer, you come out of your hole when you have something to show. What does it do. How much does it cost. When does it ship. If the latter is > 60 days, read the paragraph from the beginning.
All he really said was: Apple is doing it better than us, but one day we will show you. What a message.
Well, you heard it from him first. As usual, let Apple do all the R&D, then everyone else can pull a Samsung and fire up the copy machines, which will then result in the usual iHaters, trolls, and whiners claiming that Apple simply stole the idea from everyone else.
So true. Apple paves the way and the others hate Apple for it.
A couple things they can do now is include some good ARM-based HW to make their SmartTVs work well when accessing that UI. Everyone I've testing has been slow and clunky in every way. Take Android, fork it, and make a 10-foot User Interface for our TVs that will look great and function at speeds that make it a treat to use. There are plenty of HTPC UIs that they can steal from without much chance of a lawsuit.
They will never learn it?
How somebody, thinking about something for 5 years and unable to even get the "basics" of what his competitor is doing figured out, can be a CEO is beyond me.
Look Stringer, you come out of your hole when you have something to show. What does it do. How much does it cost. When does it ship. If the latter is > 60 days, read the paragraph from the beginning.
All he really said was: Apple is doing it better than us, but one day we will show you. What a message.
Ah yes, Apple is definitely doing it better than Sony, what with their amazing TV and all...
I'm an EE who designs IP for DTV SoCs and the industry is in big trouble. No one, not even Samsung, is making money out of DTV. The R&D costs are simply too high in comparison to the overall cost of the end product. Semi suppliers are working on incredibly tight margins to produce SoCs that are more systemically complex than a top of the range of Intel CPU but sell for about 5% of the price. It says a lot when both Intel and Broadcom canned their respective DTV businesses recently and those companies that remain are in deep trouble.
Bad times.
- because it was on top for a while, it has tried to migrate its once-successful legacy products - the PS/PSP game platform, Walkman stuff, and its extensive range of A/V hardware and accessories - into a new ecosystem. but they are actually holding it back instead.
- Sony has never been able to write user friendly software. its UI's have been techie oriented - just too complicated.
- Sony never developed its own OS either. so it's stuck with Windows on computers, and Symbian/Android on phones and tablets. that makes those products just one more commodity in an overcrowded market. and the OS for its PS devices are one-off custom setups that can't easily be extended to other products.
the focus of their new effort to "reinvent" TV that Stringer is talking about now is their new Streaming Player STB, which is also being built into their new high-end TV's.
http://store.sony.com/webapp/wcs/sto...ifier=S_Netbox
it's Sony's version of Roku, Google TV, and the other STB's with lots of web channels, on demand services, and some widgets, etc. plus DLNA sharing on your home network. there is even a Sony iOS remote control app for it. but there is nothing really special about it that puts it above all the other STB's coming out offering more or less the same features.
Sony compares it to Apple TV, pointing out it has a lot more bells and whistles built in. but what it lacks of course is ATV's new killer feature - AirPlay Mirroring from iOS devices. with that you can project every web channel and thousands of apps onto your TV screen from the best possible remote control - the iOS device in your hands.
Sony is just not special anymore.
The DTV business is fundamentally broken.
I'm an EE who designs IP for DTV SoCs and the industry is in big trouble. No one, not even Samsung, is making money out of DTV. The R&D costs are simply too high in comparison to the overall cost of the end product. Semi suppliers are working on incredibly tight margins to produce SoCs that are more systemically complex than a top of the range of Intel CPU but sell for about 5% of the price. It says a lot when both Intel and Broadcom canned their respective DTV businesses recently and those companies that remain are in deep trouble.
Bad times.
Bingo. At this stage content is king but the distribution of that content is so fragmented any one "TV platform" cannot encompass it all.
http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/10/2...acement-coming
Sony is just not special anymore.
They stood on the precipice of the new millennium with so much potential. Instead their internal divisions (literally and figuratively) ripped them apart.
Just as Japan was once great and admired, Sony is now no longer.
Sure, Samsung and Sony have decent mid-range HDTVs, and I wouldn't touch Haier or Panasonic or Philips, but it's choosing among the lesser evils whenever I go with Sony, which is increasingly rare nowadays.
Makes me a bit sad, really. They had some really nice computer monitors but they exited that business a while back. They had some nice HDTVs but lagged behind Samsung in coming out with good LED-backlit HDTVs. They jumped on the 3D bandwagon but that has sputtered out. The PS3 held great promise but Xbox360+Kinect is a more compelling package if you don't "need" BluRay.
btw, somewhat related, check out the devastating comments the Logitech CEO made about Google TV yesterday:
http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/10/2...acement-coming
Besides search, Google's best product is Android, which... yada yada yada.
GoogleTV was senseless. Not just because it didn't even have a USA-only coherent strategy.
While TV and music content is so defined by prehistoric concepts of borders... websites, apps and games will demolish them in terms of market access and deployment.
If a brand new episode of Futurama is out tomorrow, it better be available for a HD purchase of less than USD $0.50 or rental less than USD $0.25 per episode from/to anywhere around the world for virtually any platform.
But that's to radical/ cheap/ insane/ anarchistic/ communist for media and technology companies.
iTunes paved the way. Now Beatport's global distribution of music is niche, but formidable.
Denver entrepreneur tuned in market needs
By Greg Griffin
The Denver Post
POSTED: 07/31/2010 01:00:00 AM MDT
Jonas Tempel founded Beatport, the leading online store for electronic dance music. The company has more than 1 million tracks from 12,000 music labels and has 1.8 million registered users. ( Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post )
An entrepreneur's dream is to build a multimillion-dollar business from an idea. Denver's Jonas Tempel has done it twice.
His companies seemingly have little in common. Factory Design Labs is an advertising firm for top-shelf brands such as Audi, The North Face and Aspen Skiing Co. Beatport is the leading online store for electronic dance music — the iTunes for disc jockeys.
But Tempel's imprint on each is unmistakable. Both focus intently on a small, high-end sector of a large market. They serve highly discerning customers, from around the world, who spend a premium for quality, cutting-edge work. "(Each) relies on being culturally relevant," Tempel said.
And both have grown through boom times and bust. Tempel expects their combined revenue to reach $85 million this year, up from about $2.2 million in 2004, Tempel said.
Not bad for a self-described computer geek with a penchant for graphic design and a passion for disc jockeying.
Tempel launched Factory Design a few years out of college in 1996 to make fliers for raves. The business evolved into an agency specializing in high-concept design. But Tempel didn't have the time or skills needed to land and maintain big corporate accounts, he said. He left in 2004 to start Beatport, though he remains Factory Design's chairman.
Tempel, a veteran DJ, launched Beatport with fellow DJ Eloy Lopez and promoter Brad Roulier. They raised close to $300,000 from former Denver Bronco Trevor Pryce and three DJs, including Bad Boy Bill.
Factory Design later invested $1 million, followed by a $12 million investment in 2007 by Insight Venture Partners of New York, which valued the company pre-investment at $50 million. German audio-software maker Native Instruments also is a part owner, Tempel said.
Beatport ushered in a digital revolution among DJs, allowing them to download new music anytime. Today the site has 1.8 million registered users, sells music in 131 countries and accounts for 80 percent of all electronic-music sales worldwide, according to the company. It employs 70 and has offices in Denver's Ballpark neighborhood, as well as in Germany and Japan.
Beatport benefited from iTunes' success, but Tempel doesn't want to compete against the online music behemoth. His site has intensely loyal customers — 65 percent are DJs — who rely on it to constantly search out and offer new electronic music from around the world. They pay $1.49 to $2.49 a track, depending on how new it is, well above what iTunes charges.
"We do 80 percent of a track's revenue in its first 14 days," he said. "We're effectively in the fresh-food business."
Beatport has turned down offers to sell because the terms or the timing weren't right, Tempel said. But that could change. "We will have to sell this business," he said. "It's my job as CEO to make it rain for somebody."
Read more: Denver entrepreneur tuned in market needs - The Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/business/c...#ixzz1dO1VdtLz
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