The slowdown in the world economy has taken its toll on the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which was held 7-11 January. Visitors were sharply down (estimates vary between 20-30%), while some exhibitors had done last minute cancellations of their booth spaces, while others left early. The show lacked the big 'wow' announcements. but there were several developments for the telecoms and networked electronics markets. Read more

Premonvision has for a long time cautioned against the short term and potentially also the long term success of Blu-ray. Before founding Premonvision, the first report I wrote cautioning against a rapid adoption of either Blu-ray or HD DVD was in 2005. After Toshiba decided to throw in the towel and withdrew HD DVD from the market, there have been many positive forecasts provided by vendors and industry commentators. We have remained sceptics and continued to caution against a very weak Christmas quarter for Blu-ray this year, and well into 2009. Over time Blu-ray might gain a foothold in the market, however it is doubtful that there will be much profitability left in the market once price competition increases, with the introduction of more low-cost vendors. This happened to the DVD market, and will likely happen to Blu-ray as well. Read more

France Telecom in the UK, under the brand name Orange, is starting the transition of separating consumer services from the access business. Orange UK customers of the “Orange Home & Mobile Broadband” service will, aside from getting dual play services at home, also get a USB dongle for the PC, with a monthly downstream traffic allowance of 3GB per month to ensure Internet access at home and while mobile on the PC. It does not include Internet traffic for their cellular subscribers which would have been ideal for a more complete service transformation, however this is likely due to the much broader organisational issues this would have caused for France Telecom. The 3G dongle for the PC is just a small step, but it is a step in the right direction of viewing services more independently of the access technology. Read more

Today the consumer electronics giants Samsung and Sony published new financial information. Samsung released its Q3 2008 results, while Sony provided revised consolidated forecasts for its financial year. The markets sent Samsung into a free fall, and ended down 13.8%. Sony fared hardly any better, and was down 12%. Expect similar free falls as other vendors release more financial information and the market understands the gloomy situation the consumer electronics industry is facing in the run up for Christmas....... Read more