Monday, January 10, 2011

The Geeks Are Gone Now

The annual CES in Las Vegas attracts a couple hundred thousand of them from around the world who have one thing in common. They all want to be the first to own this year's "hot new thing."

As you listen to them in the media today, please keep a cool head and remind yourself that you'll never hear from the majority of the touch screen tablet computers running to catch up with iPad now.

“The thing I’m hearing most consistently from Toyota and other automakers is that HD Radio is giving them something to work with when it comes to radio,” -- Emmis chief technology officer and Broadcaster Traffic Consortium president Paul Brenner.

He claims that FM is an analog technology with very limited capability,” pointing to Toyota’s new Entune multimedia system as one of the ways automakers are incorporating HD into their digital strategy so that the user interface is consistently digital. Brenner contends that HD is helping broadcasters “stay in the fight.”

According to A&O's Roadmap perceptual tracking study, the majority of our listeners are not quite ready to jump on these new fads.

Only 2.2% of country listeners reported being "very likely" to buy HD Radio in the next 12 months.

Broadband access to the internet in vehicles had considerably more potential.

2010 A&O Country Roadmap study of 8,867 country listeners across the USA and Canada (1.6% 12-17, 6% 18=34, 13.6% 25-34, 20% 35-44, 32.5% 45-54, 19.8% 55-64, 5.7% 65-74, .7% 75+, 25.3% male, 74.7% female)

The 2011 study will be fielding in coming weeks, with results updated at the A&O pre-CRS client seminar from 1-5 pm, March 1st in Nashville.

1 comment:

Mark Lieberman (click to read his entire post) said...

Here are my top TV takeaways from the CES show:

* 3-D TV: Glasses are everywhere, but since TV is communal, the current offering will be DOA. (Of course, glasses for PC-based 3D are different and could be compelling, since the PC is a personal experience.) But the most exciting long-term opportunities are clearly in the glassless big-screen TV solutions from Toshiba, Sony, and others.

* Tablets: While Apple may still have the advantage simply because consumers will be frozen like deer in headlights by the explosion of alternative offerings, the standouts are the combination tablet-notebooks with flip keyboards and Windows 7 from Samsung and Dell.

* Smart TV: Over in the Intel booth, a "Visibly Smart" interactive zone seemed to validate the point of my post from last week -- that smart TVs, embedded with Intel's Atom chip, will make the TV box manufacturers relevant again and provide consumers with a path to the future for new applications without having to purchase new hardware.

* TV Apps: A couple of recent arrivals got the heart racing. Yahoo TV is a widget on steroids, but the game-changer is the XFINITY from Comcast, which turns your iPad into another screen in your home for linear programming and VOD -- but home is now anywhere you are. Is this the beginning of an unwired cable company?

* Trojan Horse: Hands down, the biggest game-changer of the 2011 show was, in my opinion, gesture recognition from platforms such as Kinect. If you've somehow avoided it so far, all you need to know is that Kinect is the biggest idea in video games to come along in years - and for a first-generation effort, it's remarkably fun and well-executed