It’s not news, but I was reminded of this topic yesterday while shopping and I saw side by side displays of the Bose SoundDock for iPod and the Around Ear Headphones in the AV section of my local Costco. It wasn’t that long ago that Costco was generally regarded as a pariah in the Electronics industry for […]

We all have funny stories from work. In many cases the stories we tell are funny now, but they certainly weren’t funny at the time. My introduction to AV installation was far from auspicious. I was working at an AV specialty retailer and we (mostly I, which is how I got the nickname “Projector Boy”) […]

It’s been a mystery to me for years. Selling TVs I always counselled customers that “no one has ever regretted buying a bigger TV.” And five years ago, as flat panel prices continued to drop I coined the phrase “50 is the new 42.” Well guess what? 60 is the new 50. And yet, talking to […]

Contrary to analysis that I’ve read elsewhere, Blu-ray is on life support. Despite some of the boosterism that’s accompanied the Year-Over-Year growth numbers for Blu-ray, the numbers are hardly encouraging for a format that’s nearly five years old now. 26% of packaged-media sales revenue? Compared to DVD’s 74%? Hooray, that’s real growth. So what’s stopping the studios from […]

The blog post by Joel Rollins the other day, entitled “Ya Gotta Buy In Sometime,” was on the money. It also reminded me of an episode from my retail days. Back when camcorders were both analog and expensive there was an old guy who used to come into our store regularly who was serious about buying one. […]

Alright. I’ve given it 24 hours, and let it roll around in my brain, and I am still completely baffled by DISH’s $320M bid for Blockbuster. I’m not alone either. Not only has the AV Twitterverse been gobsmacked, even Wall Street analysts whose job it is to cover DISH don’t know what to think. So far, the most positive […]

There’s a perception, and it’s only a perception, that somehow trade media journalism is a lesser cousin to mainstream media journalism. And it annoys me. Partly because that’s nonsense, and partly because, as far as I can tell, it’s a myth propagated by members of the MSM to feel better about themselves. Some people think that all […]

Even though you’re supposed to recycle electronics, the dustbin of history is stuffed with technologies that aren’t with us anymore. Some were victims of historical forces. Take MiniDisc. I LOVED MiniDisc back in the day with all the evangelical passion of a true fanboy. But alas, no matter how cool, and no matter how great the sound quality, it […]

Every time I read a press release that announces that Sony is making “a commitment to the custom channel and the small dealer” I feel like I’m stuck in Groundhog Day. Just the other week Sony announced that it was going to be taking its ES line of audio equipment out of big boxes and […]

Last week’s news that Amazon intends to bow their own unlimited streaming video service to go head to head with Netflix and Apple TV both excites and amuses me. It excites me because streaming media is where it’s at and when it comes to consumer choice, content selection, and technological innovation, the more the merrier. […]

Joel Rollins blog posts Vanishing History parts 1 and 2 got me thinking about my own experiences with analog recording media. Recently I dug up a box of mixed tapes that I had painstakingly duped in the late 1980s. Kids today with their iPods have no grasp on how much work we had to do back then to create compilations of favourite songs. […]

It’s funny how often discussion seems to revolve around the iPad. Some days it feels like that’s all that I write about. One day last year I stopped in at the butcher store and the first thing out of the owner’s mouth wasn’t “Hello” it was “So what’s the deal with the iPad?” And just yesterday my […]

Anybody who has experience with luxury goods, whether buying, selling, or both understands the psychology of Bigger Boat Syndrome. Especially as technophiles, many of us are susceptible to the seduction of toys that are newer, shinier and cooler than what we, or more importantly our friends have now. I recall one retail client I had back […]

I never have been. “Look before you leap” is definitely one of my character traits. People are often surprised by that, given my career in CE and my visibility on social media. Yet despite the fact that it seems like I’m on Twitter 24/7 I didn’t sign up for Twitter until about two years ago, […]

CES 2011 is over but that’s just the beginning of the trade show calendar for the New Year. All the dealers I know are highly focused and selective about the shows they attend: It’s typically CES, OR CEDIA Expo, OR InfoComm OR EHX, and occasionally two, but almost never more than that. On the manufacturing side, however, it’s typical for my […]

Every industry and channel has its larger than life characters. They’re the Bill Brasky types that we all tell stories about at industry functions when they’re not there, either as an inspiration or as a warning to others. If they are there, there’s an excellent chance that they’re the ones telling the story. One of my favorite […]

The phrase “you can’t be everything to everybody” gets tossed around a lot, but people seldom stop to think it through and ponder the importance of that message. I’m not aware of any successful small or medium-sized business that has ever become successful through doing a whole bunch of things half-assed, as opposed to doing […]

I remember my first December in the custom channel very clearly: 9-5 office hours, comfy chair in an office, and meetings with clients. And with the exception of being closed on Boxing Day and only half-day hours from Christmas to New Year’s Eve, it was business as usual and no different from any other month […]

Last month I had no idea that the banter on Twitter surrounding a CE Pro story about HDMI-related issues would touch off a minor flame war, and inspire Gary to write a very good blog post about the opportunities that HDMI affords to integrators. For my part, I took advantage of the discussion to Tweet a series of haikus about HDMI. In case you […]

I’ve got a lot of aphorisms that I like to live by but the notion that “It’s Better To Be Prepared Than Postpared” is one of my favorites. Sometimes I take it too far, but when it comes to system design, I don’t think that’s possible. Related to that, I’m also inclined to believe that there’s no […]

As clichéd as it sounds, the one constant in CE is change. That’s why resistance to it always comes as a surprise. Recently a story of mine went online that dealt with sustainable architecture principles, with a special focus on Daylight Harvesting: programming a lighting control system to respond to daylight levels so as to maintain a […]

It used to be called the Information Superhighway, but really, if information and news is central to your business, it’s more like trying to drink from a firehose. Like everything else work related, it helps to have a process. Here’s how I do it. I get something on the order of twenty industry-related newsletters a day […]

Now that Sony has announced its new TVs that will incorporate Google TV, the concept is beginning to look less like vaporware and more like yet another entrant to the coming content wars. So I guess that means it’s time to start blogging about it, in anticipation for when it’s finally released and we can get our […]

I was talking the other day with an integrator on the east coast of the US. Like a lot of conversations I have with people in the industry, there’s always some small talk about business conditions in our local markets. As I told him, in the past eighteen months, in Edmonton and Calgary pretty much […]

Reflecting on discussions I had on the topic of 3DTV at CEDIA Expo last week, a clear trend emerges: beyond the official pitches the exhibitors were giving during their booth tours, no one is really that keen on 3D. One bon mot that swept across Twitter last week was: “Too bad LED and 3D came out at the same […]

Last week I submitted a story for rAVe [Publications] that detailed the trend of AV installers moving away from using Wi-Fi unless absolutely necessary. The main reason cited was that the sheer density of Wi-Fi routers in both residences and commercial operations in urban spaces has led to wireless traffic jam, seriously inhibiting the ability of any of those devices to […]