The global Bluetooth headphone market is projected to grow at a 12.3% compound annual growth rate, to $17.5 billion, through 2025, said Million Insights Friday. It cited 3D sound, on-board storage, gesture recognition, noise cancellation and digital hearing aid features as drivers. North America is expected to have the highest growth, 12.9%.
Four Utah stations went live with ATSC 3.0 broadcasts, Sinclair announced Wednesday. Sinclair owns KUTV Salt Lake City and KJZZ-TV Salt Lake City; Nexstar owns KTVX Salt Lake City and KUCW Ogden. The stations join other recent 3.0 ones in Las Vegas, Pittsburgh and Nashville.
Samsung released its next-generation series of solid-state storage drives with capacity up to 8 TB. Read speed is 560 MB per second and write speed 530 MB per second, it said.
AT&T 5G is now live in 355 markets, including 28 announced Monday. Dallas, Salt Lake City, Miami, Orlando and Hawaii's Maui County are among the latest.
Ossia is collaborating with Japanese electrical products company Marubun for its Cota wireless over-the-air power technology, it said Wednesday. Devices can be activated, managed and monitored via the Cota Cloud platform, it said, and its receivers embedded into IoT devices, wearables and other electronics across industrial, automotive and consumer applications. Marubun will be a sales arm for Ossia in Japan, a market “aggressively pursuing” technology innovation such as wireless power, said Ossia. Energous has gotten regulatory approval for its charging technology (see 2002280015).
BlackBerry CEO John Chen acknowledges it was “a rough year for our share price and our equity value,” but he and the board are “extremely bullish about our going-forward plan,” he told the company’s annual shareholder meeting virtually Tuesday. The ambition is to become the “must-have software provider for endpoints,” said Chen. BlackBerry sees a $38 billion market opportunity in helping “people that build devices” for the smart home or smart city, he said. The compound annual growth rate of the software business has been about 20% the past four years, said Chen. “We're pretty pleased with that number,” but “we're working very hard to make it higher than that,” he said. The “technology lab” was created about a year ago, he said. “We’ve done a lot of good stuff,” including the automotive cybersecurity tech it demonstrated at CES to “predict certain fault conditions in the car,” he said. Shares closed 3.5% lower Wednesday at $4.92.
Vizio added the Movies Anywhere app to its SmartCast smart TV platform, it said Tuesday. Users can access movies purchased across platforms and digital retailer accounts through the app, it said. Participating studios are Sony, Universal (including DreamWorks and Illumination Entertainment), Disney (including Disney, Pixar, Twentieth Century Studios, Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm), and Warner Bros. Consumers can sync movie collections across Apple TV, Prime Video, Vudu/Walmart, Xfinity, Google Play/YouTube, Microsoft Movies & TV, FandangoNOW and Verizon Fios TV.
Global OLED panel revenue will increase 14% in 2020 to $31.8 billion, and will grow to $51.2 billion by 2025, reported Display Supply Chain Consultants Monday. It expects smartphones to “continue to dominate the revenue picture” for OLED panels, but its share will “slowly erode as other applications pick up,” it said. Smartphones were 81% of OLED panel revenue in 2019, “but we expect that share to decline to 67% in 2025,” it said. TV panel revenue will increase steadily, “as we expect innovation to push OLED TV to continued success in the premium TV space,” said DSCC.
With 30% of U.S. households using a smart speaker, consumers are gravitating toward an integrated ecosystem with a voice assistant at the core, reported NPD Thursday. Of those homes, the biggest increases in connected technology adoption are in home automation (+152%), smartwatches (+120%), smart TVs (+60%), smart gaming consoles (+60%), streaming media players (+44%) and tablets (+26%), it said.
SiriusXM said Wednesday buying podcast management platform Simplecast, combined with the acquirer's AdsWizz, lets creators publish and generate revenue. Simplecast and AdsWizz will form SiriusXM’s publisher solution business. Sirius has Pandora for Podcasters, it noted.