Faultline: Sony feels new HD confidence in aftermath of Blu-ray win Apr 16, 2008 – Rethink Research
The confidence with which Sony strode onto the stage at its pre-show National
Association of Broadcaster (NAB) annual event in Las Vegas, said much about
how the Blu-ray win has changed attitudes within the famous Japanese brand.
For the past 5 years Sony has struggled with its identity, but one stronghold
that really has not been challenged is its high end professional video camera
ranges. By winning the Blu-ray war, suddenly it is no longer just doing well
in cameras, but doing well in HD, which accounted for the HDNA slogan that
underpinned the Sony message that HD is part of the company’s DNA.
Sony was in its element at NAB, which is where Hollywood meets broadcasters
in the ritzy backdrop of glitzy Las Vegas. Alex Shapiro, head of sales for
the Broadcast Division of Sony moderated an event that returned time and time
again to the message HDNA, showing off a range of cameras, spearheaded by its
XDCAM range which have now sold some 31,000 units, in a price range from
$1,800 all the way up to $200,000.
Our Faultline team once did a project for a broadcaster and all roads led to
the XDCAM range for cameras – it does pretty much what everyone would
want in a camera, and Sony probably leads on adding features that make the
devices even better suited to the digital age. The cameraman can mark the
shot that he thinks he best, and only send the “takes” to the
studio, he can wirelessly send a proxy file ahead of the real HD file, so
that editors can get to grips with macro editing, and deal with the HD file
just for playout, not that these are new features, just that Sony is the
company putting them into devices first. The modern NGC or news gathering
camera is light, cheap, and can be taken anywhere, and is set up to feed the
internet and to work with MPEG 4/H.264 as much as being used for newscasts
and the old MPEG 2 world of broadcasting.
The Sony XDCAM range also stores huge amounts of video, on a built in hard
disk, on internal and attachable flash memory and on portable (luggable)
solid state recorders which hold up to 260 minutes of high definition
footage. And its viewfinder is built in OLED, the next generation screen
technology which is now finding its ways into handsets and portable video
players because of the incredibly visual quality that technology offers,
especially on small screens.
But of course if all broadcasters had to go to the store to buy Sony
equipment, then it would not have the grip it has around the business,
instead it showed the confidence of a company, to borrow the Sony marketing,
which is literally built into the DNA of broadcasting. It offered new
features to Switchers, the consoles that control which stream of a video in a
broadcasting set up is live, which one is routed to the viewing screes or the
remote studio, and it offered all the conversion tools, the encoders, the AVI
adaptors and the service levels that make up the infrastructure that make
Sony impossible to unseat from this business. The cameras also allow for
metadata to be generated at the camera level and adapted and used throughout
the video production workflow.
Stage walk-ons by customers ranged from Miss Universe at one end and an
evangelical church reaching out to TV audiences in HD at the other, to Sesame
Street, which has just switched to XDCAM, and content producers and operators
such as CNN, CBS, Warner Brothers, Cablevision, Tribune, all making moves
with Sony in HD. Individual programs were mentioned, such as Survivor, and
NBC is using the XDCAM to record the Olympics in Beijing, as well as one of
the incredibly popular Novellas (one about a modern vampire) made in Spanish
for the Latin American market, which suggests that infrastructure there is
coming into line to deliver HD.
Sony heaped on other HD deals - VGTRK, the Russian State TV and Radio company
said it has used Sony’s Professional Services division to create its
first HD outside broadcast truck, which will be put in commission at the end
of 2008, as well as Russian and Italian coverage of both the Euro 2008 soccer
competition and the Olympics being based on PDW-700 camcorders and decks.
Sony is already flying in its consumer camera business, and if we take
reports that Blu-ray is now doubling or better in revenues since the
company’s win over Toshiba in the high definition DVD stakes, there is
a lot of expectation around Sony. If its PS3 continues to gain ground on the
Xbox, as recent months have suggested, and Sony Ericsson’s recent blip
doesn’t turn into a full scale, Motorola style, fall from grace, and if
Sony can hang on to the shirt tails of Samsung in the LCD and OLED flat TV
screen race, then Sony may finally break out of the lowly valuation that the
company has suffered for the past 5 years and regain some of its previous
grandeur. Is this perhaps the quiet, but persistent strategy of new CEO
Howard Stringer, finally reaching fruition?
CourtesyRethink
Research, publisher of Faultline, a weekly
feature on technology and innovation.
Faultline: Sony feels new HD confidence in aftermath of Blu-ray win
