4K & Osborne Effect

Once again, the movie makers are giving advice to the TV industry about how to run the TV business. Taking the theatrical cinema folk's advice about home TV, even home theater is why the TV industry spent so much time hyping 3D well before its time. A basic premise in the article is incorrect regarding TV sizes. In general, the public had found its way to sitting at the retina limiting distance for standard definition TV. In the transition to HDTV, with twice as many scan lines, they had to either get a set that is twice as tall or sit half the distance to still be at the retina limiting distance. Instead, the public mainly bought 32" wide screens that are exactly the same height as a 27" square screen and sat at the same distance. Since the transition, the average size LCD TV has crept up from a 32W to a 38W. The public is still not taking advantage of HDTV resolution, let alone doubling it again.

Normally, I would not be one to criticize the industry regarding anything done to increase profitability in what is largely a profitless business. However, sometimes the things that are done to increase ASPs actually discourage sales. In the early 1990's TV set sales were depressed by talk of HDTV. The discussion in the press about the new standard lead people to believe that HDTV was just around the corner and many postponed buying a TV set thinking that they should wait and get an HDTV. Talk of a new standard frequently discourages sales of current models. This is known as Osborn effect for Adam Osborne driving his own company out of business talking about the next model Osborne Computer, that wasn't ready, and consequently not being able to sell the current one. I believe that 3D had a similarly chilling effect. And now comes 4K.

As I said in a previous post, 4K will be a great boon the digital signage. No doubt it will garner some consumer sales as well. However the net effect on total consumer sales dollars will be minimal if it is positive at all. Currently, widespread realease of 5G smartphones is not expected until 2020. However, whith smartphone prices climbing into the $1000 range, sales of 4G smartphones during 2019 may be impacted by consumers postponing purchases to get the new 5G technology.

What Could it Be

Oft times, when someone spots a trend, they offer a solution as if it were the only reason for the trend. On many occasions, the offered solution has little do do with causing the trend but is either a result of some other underlying factor or is auto-correlated with the real cause. Medical studies are frequently guilty of this. someone announces that "A" lifestyle is correlated with mortality from "B" disease where "A" lifestyle is also correlated with poverty which means you are more likely to die (particularly if you do not have healthcare) from any disease.

I say this as a prelude to some stark data. It seems that in spite of the crash of "08" and the subsequent "Great Recession", job offerings in digital signage have quadrupled over the last four years. Further, there seems to have been o offerings prior to '06.

In truth, people have been using video displays as signage since there have been video displays. As I relate in a number of previous posts, the amount of "unaccounted" TVs, TVs sold in the US but not showing up in the sets per household numbers were always in the millions per year. Some of this was surveyed consumers loosing track of just how many TVs they owned, but most of the number were TVs converted to advertising or other commercial purposes. So the start of the employment numbers for "digital signage" was just the term coming into usage, not that there was no employment prior to '06.

The growth of the employment number in large part relates to the growth in the use of the term. However, much of that growth was probably expended by 2010 or 2011. At that time rather than the growth in employment offers flattening, it seems to have accelerated. Of course the offered graph charts job postings mentioning "digital signage" as a percent of all postings and some part of that growth would be do to a lack of jobs in other areas. But, even considering all of the other factors, that chart is fairly stunning.

After thinking about it for six months, a good friend of mind in the display industry decided that in time, digital signage could be as large as TV in terms of total screen area. It may never happen and it will certainly not happen soon but a casual reading of this chart leads me to believe that employment in the industry is not only trending upwards but accelerating upwards.

4K

My comment on 4K can be found on the LinkedIn Digital Signage Expo comment thread here. Basically, I make the argument that since Americans generally do not sit close enough (or have a large enough screen) to get the full benefit of HDTV, increasing the resolution to 4K does not matter much. But it will matter a whole lot to the digital signage market.

Voice v. Touch

In today's CNET coverage of CES, Intel VP Mooly Eden is forecasting that voice recognition will make touch obsolete. Of course for conversion to voice recognition to be absolute, it must do something that even most human brains can't do, understand everyone's accent. It must also be able to pick out a particular voice among the ambient din. But of course, voice recognition is computationally intensive where touch isn't.

As touch has not completely replaced keyboards, voice recognition will find its place (or places), but it will be mostly to augment human interfaces or provide a natural interface where touch is not practical.