Blog articles from 02/2010

Parks Associates is supporting the Digital Music Forum East to be held from February 24-25 in New York City. Digital Music Forum East is the only event in the United States that brings together the top music, technology and policy leaders for high-level discussions and debate, intimate meetings and unrivaled networking about the future of digital music. More Info

AT&T will have more incentive to upgrade their 3G network . On February 4, AT&T announced that it would support use of the SlingPlayer over their mobile network. Prior to this announcement, AT&T had limited use of the Sling app only to Wi-Fi networks.

How'd that Hulu ad from the 2009 Super Bowl work out? Pretty darn well, it turns out. At the end of 2009, Hulu offficials noted that the number of monthly users was 43 million, double the number from year-end 2008. They also indicated that the 924 million viewed clips over the last 30-day period was three times the amount from a year ago. Let's see what success VIZIO has with their Super Bowl commerical from yesterday , which is the first time I've ever seen a connected TV...

In a press release that we issued last week, we stated that the European market for digital home technical support services was wide open, as consumers tend to look at a variety of potential providers - retailers, independent companies, PC OEMs, and broadband providers - to solve PC and other home technology problems. These results come from our Customer Support in the Digital Home: Europe study. Ziggo has now launched a tech support service in The Netherlands . Service Plus includes...

Parks Associates is hosting a Residential Energy Management on Thursday, February 25th at 1 PM Central. With the president’s stimulus bill squarely behind Smart Grid development, 2010 should see significant investment in new technologies from the back office to the network to the meter and to devices in the home. Will consumers pay to purchase devices with energy savings potential?

This was interesting news, particularly since we completed a Webcast today where we talked about the very dymanic market for supplying Web capabilities to the consumer electronics market. Today, Nagravision announced that it was partnering with Samsung Electronics America to provide TV applications an interactivity to Web-connected Samsung products such as connected TVs and Blu-ray players. It's interesting that a company like Nagravision - which has a strong foundation in providing...

Broadcast & Cable reported on Consumer Reports' tests of Web-connected TVs and Blu-ray players and devices such as broadband-connected TiVos and game consoles. It sounds like the reviews were generally favorable - Consumer Reports indicates that video quality was pretty decent. One of the key conclusions from them is for consumers to take a closer looks at the connected Blu-ray players, as they will obviously be lower-cost alternatives to a full-blown connected TV. That makes sense -...

Interesting data from Retrevo regarding drivers for the purchase of an HDTV in the short-term. According to their latest Pulse Report , price beats the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics in a big way as the key driver for buying an HDTV. Furthermore, about half of consumers in this study weren't aware of whether they would be able to watch the Winter Olympics in high-definition. Yeesh...seems like NBC has a lot of work to do.