Happy New Year all! It’s been a while since I’ve posted to my personal blog and I’ve resolved to do a better job in 2013 keeping up with the digital Joneses.
In keeping with this resolution, here’s the first of several posts today that address my wheelhouse subject matter pertaining to the the intersection of marketing and technology.
This Wall Street Journal article on Ultra HDTV’s details the pre-Consumer Electronics Show hype around the latest and greatest in HDTV…Ultra HD also known as 4K because it features four-times the resolution of the current 1080p HDTV’s (that’s EIGHT million pixels in Ultra versus the measly two million pixels in just HD tv) …never mind that the human eye is incapably of discerning this pixel difference on any TV under 200-inches in diameter (I’m making that last part up…I don’t know how big an Ultra HDTV…or house to contain your TV, for that matter, you’d need before the resolution difference on blackheads in the facial pores of your local 10p news casters face are clearly evident beneath their make-up).
See, for an industry apparently running out of good ideas, Full HD, thinner HD, more stylish HD, 3D HD and Internet/Wireless-Connected HDTV’s haven’t been enough to feed the sales and profitability margins of either manufacturers or retailers. Prices continue to fall as consumers wait for the AppleHDTV or whatever it will be called. Did anybody mention, what consumers really want is content that’s remarkably different from the “must subscribe to 500-useless channels” version we now are forced into?
Over the holidays, when attempting to purchase a HDTV for my daughter and grand daughter for their Christmas gift, I was shocked at how low the prices have dropped…not in Best Buy or Sears, but in the secondary market. CraigsList is full of good deals on HDTV sets that just five years ago were selling for thousands of dollars. I was able to get a 55-inch Sony SXRD, which offers a great 1080p image, in a slightly more thick and bulky form factor, for just $200! I purchased this TV’s slightly larger big brother, the 60-inch SXRD, as a year-end gift to myself in 2006. And, even though Sony was one of my clients at the time and I received a generous vendor discout, it still cost me over $2,000! So, in under six years, the price has dropped off a cliff. It’s still a great TV and the only problem I’ve ever had is having to replace the somewhat pricey bulb ($200) every couple years. True, it’s not as sleek as an ultra-thin LED but try replacing one of their burnt out bulbs yourself!
