Onion: Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work

Heh, you’d be amazed how many people sent this to me yesterday.




Link.

It’s good to see Sony refocusing on their core competency.

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More Bloggotage On Circuit City's Bankruptcy

I've just been told by an inside source that at the same time that other video vendors like Sony and Toshiba and Sharp (who is only out $7 million, most of which is probably insured) were pulling back from Circuit City, Samsung was very aggressive in offering Circuit City sweet terms in an effort to hoover up market share from the other brands.

Now they’re on the hook for $115 million. Looks like that cunning plan didn’t pan out as well as they might have hoped.

And while I'm on the subject, what where the cowboys in Hewlett-Packard's national accounts office thinking? Looking at the creditor filing, what's startling is how far out in front HP is from everyone but Samsung, which makes me wonder if they had any risk management at all. There's no way that HP's $119 million in receivables is just 90 days current. Did they just think that they could stem the bleeding at CC by throwing product at them?

It makes me wonder how exposed HP is to other large retail partners, and how on top of the timely collecting of their receivables they are.

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Circuit City Creditor List Published

This just handed to me by one of my contacts: the filing that lists all of beleagured failing CE retailer Circuit City's creditors.

Circuit City Creditors

Get your own at Scribd or explore others:

The stuff you really want to know starts on page 16. But for those of you who are impatient, here's the list of Circuit City's Top Five Creditors:

1. 
   
   Hewlett Packard $118,797,964


2. 
   
   Samsung $115,925,716


3. 
   
   Sony $60,009,803


4. 
   
   Zenith $41,162,162


5. 
   
   Toshiba $17,919,395

Keen CE retail hawks will notice that Toshiba is out less than a third of what CC owes Sony, and a tenth of what HP's holding the bag for. That likely speaks well to Toshiba's risk management, since by all accounts they turned off the tap for Circuit City six months ago, after Blockbuster withdrew their takeover bid.

For that matter, look how comparatively little many CE brands were exposed. Sharp is only owed $7 million, Onkyo $4.2 million, and Klipsch $3.5 million. Peanuts, really. It's a Well Known Fact that suppliers had been tightening the screws for some time, which ultimately contributed to hastening CC's demise.

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Panasonic Aiming For Control Of Sanyo: Panasanyo?

Both TWICE and Marketnews are reporting that Panasonic is interested in gaining a controlling interest in Sanyo.

TWICE:Report: Panasonic To Acquire Control Of Sanyo

Panasonic has agreed “in principal” to deals to acquire controlling interest in its struggling competitor Sanyo Electric, according to a report Sunday by The Nikkei news service, but Panasonic and Sanyo officials denied Monday any
such deal had been struck.
According to Japanese reports over the weekend, Panasonic reportedly intends to purchase a majority stake in Sanyo and convert it into a subsidiary by next April.

Marketnews: Panasonic Might Buy Sanyo?

If Panasonic officially purchases Sanyo, which some say could happen as early as the end of this year, it would allow Panasonic to leverage Sanyo’s expertise in the battery arena; an area with which Panasonic already holds high marks. Both companies are also strong forces in the handheld camcorder and projector markets, and a partnership could help ramp up market share in those categories. Additionally, Sanyo has its own thriving solar panel business, which would be a new area of involvement for Panasonic.

Great timing to strategize on the battery category, given that Sony is once again experiencing problems with exploding defective laptop batteries.

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Sony Up On Net Profit, Down On Sales Volume

But overall, not a bad 4Q, really.

Sony posts profit but expects decline this year

For the fiscal fourth quarter, Sony posted a profit of 29 billion yen ($277 million), a reversal from a loss of 67.6 billion yen in the same period last year.
For the financial year through March, Sony earned a better-than-expected profit of 369.4 billion yen ($3.5 billion), a record for the company known for its Walkman portable players and "Spider-Man" movies.
That's nearly triple the 126 billion yen earned in the previous fiscal year. Quarterly sales dropped 6.5 percent to 1.95 trillion yen ($18.6 billion).
...
The biggest obstacle is the unfavorable currency swings that are expected in months ahead, the company said.
Sony is expecting the dollar to trade at about 100 yen for the current fiscal year. The dollar, which traded at an average of about 114 yen last year, fell below 100 yen earlier this year and is now trading around 105 yen.

To use a barely appropriate analogy, their gain in net profit owes more to having coughed up the last dregs of the financial hairball that the Playstation 3 launch had clogged their bowels with, and now their operating cash flow isn't stoppered up any more.

On the bright side, since analysts are tired of hearing Sony alternate between blaming everything on PS3 or Nintendo, they're going to point fingers at the yen for the next few earnings calls.

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Sony Strives To Be Market Leader In Alienating Consumers

Well, the Australian ones, anyway.

Sydney Morning Herald: Sony customers still waiting for free PS3s

Sony Bravia LCD TV buyers have been waiting for up to four months for the company to make good on its promise to give them a free PlayStation 3 games console.
...
Between December 21 last year and January 28, Sony promised that anyone who bought a Bravia high-definition LCD TV set would receive a bonus PS3, as long as they had their receipt and could cite the TV's serial number.

Vendors love rebate offers because less than 15% of consumers send in their rebate form, and consumers hate rebates because of the hoop jumping, delays, and often impenetrable fine print involved in claiming them.

But people are apt to get a lot more militant about a Playstation3 that never arrives than a $10 cheque for buying a thumb drive.

Here's a hint: logistics people need to sit down with the marketing people, go over their forecasts, and then earmark an appropriate number of units into allocation just for the freebie offer. Maybe Sony Australia did all that, and still came up short, but they're not talking.

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Sony Dips Its Toes Into Home Automation, Again

CE Pro: Sony, Control4 to Release Multiroom Entertainment/Control Solution

Sony is about to roll out a “pre-configured” and “pre-wired” 12-zone home entertainment and control rack system that includes home control via a Control4 HC-500 and comes in a pre-built Middle Atlantic AXS rack.
The system will be available this spring with a fully-installed price that will vary based on the selection of components, according to Sony, adding that typical installations will range from $40,000 to $85,000.

You know what this is? It's an HCiB: Home Control in a Box!*

Given it's All-In-Wonder specifications, I would guess that it's targeting at young integration companies that need something that doesn't take too much design work. While it's laudable to have solutions up your sleeve that look custom but are actually cookie-cutter, I can't help but think that Sony is counting on a large enough base of dealers who are too young to know how past dalliances between Sony and integration dealers have played out in the past. I'll give you a hint: visualize a back with knives sticking out of it.

*you heard that here first.

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Sony Still Clinging To The 20th Century

The thing in the photo above isn't the stunt double for the Monolith in 2001: A Space Oddessy. It's Sony's new entertainment hub, the HES-V1000 .

Intended to be the centerpiece of the connected home, it features audio distribution, a 500-gig hard drive, and a 200-disc Blu-ray carousel changer.

What!?

Not to be negative, but I still have flashbacks to the hideous service issues that haunted Sony's 200 and 400-disc CD jukeboxes back in the 1990's, not to mention the later 200 disc DVD players.

So here we are in 2008, and Sony's built a carousel into a putative home media center. There's a technical term for this in our business. It's called "Are you fucking kidding me?"

If any of you is considering this beast, please also consider the extended warranty. That's all I'm saying.

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Best Buy Favors Blu-ray: When It Rains, It Pours

One of my favorite positive-thinking aphorisms is "you can choose to start your day over." I'll bet right now many execs at Toshiba are thinking the same.

CE Pro: Best Buy to Promote Blu-ray; Who’s Next?

Best Buy has announced that they will recommend Blu-ray as the preferred high-definition format for their customers the same day that Netflixdecided to drop HD DVD from its stocks.
Although Best Buy will continue to stock HD DVD hardware and software, the big-box retailer says that, beginning in March, they will “prominently showcase Blu-ray hardware and software products” both online and in-store (press release).

Reading this, I can't help but think of two things: first that this is game, set and match for Sony and Blu-ray. Second, that Best Buy's decision to actively promote one over the other is a marked contrast from Circuit City's professed format neutrality.

Why is one big box retail chain taking sides, but not the other? It's because they can. By any meaningful yardstick, the big blue box has a lot of clout. Even more than Toshiba, whom I suspect exerted some pressure on Circuit City after those reports of HD-DVD being cleared out began to circulate. Suppliers squeeze dealers, and dealers squeeze suppliers: it's the retail Circle of Life (go re-read my post from Christmas 2006 about the politics of allocating Playstation 3's). In this case, Best Buy is the 800lb gorilla, and Toshiba is ill advised to complain too loudly, lest they see orders dwindle from Best Buy for everything that isn't an HD-DVD player.

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Sony Number One In LCD TV Shipments

See, I'm not always hounding Sony about their failures. I give them their laurels too.

Marketnews: Sony Jumps to Number-One in LCD

In a quick turn of events, Sony jumped four spots to acquire the number one spot in LCD shipments worldwide during the fourth quarter of 2007. In Q3, Sony was fourth overall when it came to unit shipments, trailing behind Sharp, Vizio, and Samsung.
...
According to figures provided by DisplaySearch in its Global TV Shipment and Forecast Report, Sony’s share increased to 12.8 per cent from just under 10 per cent in the previous quarter, representing a whopping 83 per cent quarter-over-quarter growth. Sony led the pack in large-sized LCD TVS ranging in size from 40-54”.

All of this begs the issue that from a performance standpoint, plasma remains superior to LCD, but let's not let that rain on Sony's parade. In terms of LCD flat panels, they are very good at what they do.

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Singlehandedly subverting the Format War since 2006

I totally LOL'ed at the first comment posted on this week's CE Pro column "Are Blu-ray, HD DVD Incentives Changing the Format War?" :

Posted by Michael on 01/31
at 10:31 AM
I have been advising and selling my clients DVD Players that upconvert to 1080; because if you persuade them to choose either format which happens to be the format that looses the war the first question you receive is why did you sale me that player?...I followed your advise your the expert.

Does this mean that when either Toshiba or Sony (or both, but right now probably just Toshiba) hold a downbeat press conference, they're going to publically blame me for their problems?

I can only hope.

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Blu-ray vs HD-DVD still full of mixed tidings

It's still hard to draw a clear picture. Although, honestly, things aren't really looking so hot for either format.

On the one hand, Circuit City has just started clearing out all HD-DVD hardware and software. Rumours persist that it's not just inventory reduction prior to new hardware, but a commitment to go 100% with Blu-ray. If the latter, that might be the first indications that the struggling retailer is beginning to get its act together.

Yet on the other hand, there's evidence that the fantastic sales increase in Blu-ray players that was trumpeted last were salted with the free Blu-ray players offered as package deals with televisions by Sony, Panasonic, and Sharp. A free player is nice if you were going to buy a TV anyway, but it's not necessarily the driving decision maker, is it?

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Endgame for Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD?

With only 14 more sleeps until Christmas, the HD format war looks to be entering a new, final, and in my opinion, kind-of-desperate phase.

This week's A&B Sound flyer is chock full of HD offers. For example:

*FREE Sharp BDHP20U Blu-ray player with purchase of LC37D62U 37-inch LCD TV, only $1699!

*FREE Toshiba HD-A3 HD-DVD player with the purchase of 32HL57 32-inch LCD TV, only $1199 and NO GST!

*FREE Sony BDP-S500 Blu-ray player with the purchase of KDL40V3000 40-inch LCD TV, only $2299, and NO GST!

Prices so low they're crazy!

In all seriousness, from a retail perspective, these are astonishingly aggressive offers. In fact, were I in the market for a secondary television for a spare room, any one of those deals would make me seriously consider getting off the fence and taking a side, whether for Blu-ray or HD-DVD. For someone as hard bitten and cynical a retail hawk as me to say that speaks volumes for the appeal offers like this provide to the mass consumer.

Is the format war over? Hell no, it's just getting interesting. Who can prostitute give away enough players to reach critical mass for their installed base? Only time will tell.

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Playstation3 sales up 298%

In case all you think I ever do around here is mock Playstation 3, here's some upbeat news for a change:

GameDaily: PS3 Sales Up Nearly 300% Since November 2

Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) sent along some sales data today for how its PlayStation business fared last week at the "top 10 retailers" in North America, including the busy Black Friday shopping period. As a whole, PlayStation brand unit sales during the week increased by 178 percent and sales dollars increased by 154 percent.
Furthermore, Sony said that on a year-on-year basis, PS3 hardware sales were up 245 percent compared to Black Friday sales last year. And since November 2, when the new 40GB SKU and thereduced in price ($499) 80 GB model both were available, Sony said PS3 hardware sales are up 298 percent.

I'm going to forgo the obvious jokes about multiplication by zero and instead say good for them, although they still have a long row to hoe before their Installed Base of PS3-as Blu-ray players becomes large enough to call the format war in Sony's favor.

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Blu-ray and HD-DVD "stalemated", Sony backpedaling

TWICE: Stringer: Format War At Stalemate

New York — Sony CEO Howard Stringer said during a public interview Thursday the high-definition disc format war between Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD is at a stalemate, according to an Associated Press report.
“It's a difficult fight,” AP quoted Stringer as saying during the interview at the 92nd Street Y cultural center in Manhattan. “We were trying to win on the merits, which we were doing for a while, until Paramount changed sides.”

If history has taught us anything, it is that when an apparatchik from Sony makes a statement that is anything other than a glowing outlook full of candy canes, unicorns and rainbows, then the situation is really, really grim.

For Stringer to speak of anything other than certain victory bodes poorly for what Sony expects from their Christmas sales figures.

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Samsung unseats Vizio as #1 TV brand

More evidence of the tospy-turvy Christmas retail season we're in for:

CNet.com Samsung regains TV lead; Vizio back to No. 2

A sense of order has been restored to the North American TV market this quarter.
A few months after newcomer Vizio stunned the flat-panel television industry by ranking No. 1 in market share for the second quarter of 2007, the old stalwarts have reclaimed their positions. Samsung moved back to No. 1 in overall flat-panel shipments with 11.8 percent of the total market, according to DisplaySearch. Vizio fell to No. 2 with a 10.2-percent share, down from 12 percent the previous quarter. The rest of the list includes Sharp at 10 percent, Sony at 8.6, and Funai (which makes the Sylvania brand) at a 7.2 percent share.
Samsung was able to regain its position because it has a strong presence in both the liquid crystal display (LCD) and plasma markets. Vizio is ranked No. 2 in LCD, but not in the top five of plasma vendors. Another key difference is Samsung sells mostly through national retailers, while Vizio's products have been popular in club stores.

Isn't it interesting how the only Japanese brands in the top five are Sony and Sharp? Of those two, Sony is the only venerable brand, Sharp being a relative upstart to the video business. And overall, three of the top five best selling brands can be considered price point, or bargain basement entry level sets. Maybe I'm prejudiced, but I still don't consider Samsung to be a first tier brand for television quality.

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Blu-ray takes the lead, for the moment

CE Pro: Blu-ray Outsells HD DVD Nearly 2-1 Through September, Research Shows

Blu-ray discs have outsold HD DVD titles by nearly 2-to-1 through September of this year, according to new statistics from Home Media Research (via Reuters).
From January 1 to September 30, 2.6 million Blu-ray discs were sold, compared to 1.4 million HD DVD titles.
Home Media Research also estimates that, since the formats launched in the spring of 2006, Blu-ray discs have outsold HD DVD titles by an estimated 3.01 million to 1.97 million.

I think that I speak for everyone when I say "Can't we just get it over with already?"

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Sony cutting Playstation 3 price in time for Christmas

Marketnews: Sony Drops PS3 Price Again

Just in time for the upcoming holiday season, Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc. (SCEA) has reduced the price of the 80 GB PlayStation 3 (PS3) gaming console by $160 to a more attractive price point of $499. The 80 GB version of the console was introduced in August at a retail price of $659, at which time the original 60 GB edition was reduced by $100 to sell for $549. As of November 2, SCEA is replacing the 60 GB model with a new 40 GB version that will sell for an MSRP of $399.

Last year the core gamers all bought theirs. Is this price cut enough to push casual gamers over the edge?

Better yet, will a lower price point PS3 be bought in droves as a Blu-ray player for people's home entertainment systems, and pooch sales of Sony's CAD $599 BPDS300 player?

Anyone care to guess?

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Today in Gadget Talk: When will this format war end?

Marketnews Gadget Talk: The Format War Drags On

You don't know what it took for me to actually swallow my pride and call this format war in favor of Sony.

I know, I have a nearly infinite faith in Sony's ability to screw up, but they have amassed the heaviest hitters in the industry in their camp, which is a total 180-degree change from their historical posture of "Doesn't Play Well With Others." Who would ever have imagined that this particular leopard could change it's spots?

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Will Panasonic drive Blu-ray to the Winner's Circle?

It just might turn out that way, since Panasonic is talking tough about it.

TWICE: Panasonic Execs Bullish On Blu-ray

Top executives of Matsushita Electric Industrial, marketers of the Panasonic brand worldwide, made pointed comments about the Blu-ray/HD DVD format war and current CE conditions to the press at the CEATEC Japan 2007 show on Tuesday.
The most direct remarks in roundtable discussions with the press were from Kazuhiro Tsuga, executive officer, who was reminded of his criticism of combination Blu-ray/HD DVDplayers in the past when he said that Panasonic “would never introduce such a stupid product.” When asked if LG and Samsung’s combi introductions have changed Panasonic’s mind, he joked that they haven’t “like those stupid companies.”
He then got serious and explained, “Fortunately we haven’t changed our mind ... we believe that movie studios” will select one format, namely Blu-ray sooner rather than later. When reminded that Paramount has decided to carry HD DVD, Tsuga was adamant, “Everyone knows that big [promotional] money from Toshiba or Microsoft has gotten backing for [HD DVD]. Major studios backing Blu-ray want us to put more money behind promoting the format” and its features “to make the market bigger.”

Long time readers (both of you) may remember what I said last year when Panasonic announced their support for Blu-ray:

To sum up: For those who watch for Signs of the Apocalypse, their worst fears were confirmed when last week Panasonic announced that they are climbing into bed with Sony and their Blu-ray technology. This marks a dramatic shift from Panasonic's historical business model of "Look at what Sony is building, and do the opposite." During the last format war between DVD-Audio and Super Audio-CD, Panasonic was a major champion of DVD-A (although calling DVD-A vs. SACD a "format war" is a little overblown, since both formats were essentially stillborn in the marketplace). Panasonic also proudly never built a MiniDisc recorder, and went out of their way to bury Betamax under a mountain of VHS-format VCRs.

No word yet on famine, rains of flaming toads, or the rise of Great Leviathan from the deeps

.

I'm starting to think that Blu-ray will come out on top, and Panasonic will be the 800lb Gorilla that puts it there.

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