Amazon teams with Samsung, studios on ultra high-definition TV

January 8, 2014 Leave a comment

Amazon teams with Samsung, studios on ultra high-definition TV

6:54pm EST

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc is teaming up with Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and major media corporations including Warner Bros and Lionsgate to popularize “4K” ultra high-definition television.Amazon, whose Instant Video service serves up thousands of movies and TV programs in direct competition with Neflix Inc, did not outline specifics on their collaboration in a Monday announcement.

But Samsung and other consumer electronics makers are hoping that 4K TV – so-called because they are said to offer four times the resolution of conventional high-definition images – will take off as a format and recharge sales.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the South Korean tech giant said in a separate statement it also will work with other content distributors, including Netflix and cable operators Comcast and DirecTV, on promoting 4K TV.

Amazon, for its part, has been investing heavily in digital media, hoping to draw traffic and drive new sales as consumers increasingly spurn traditional TV offerings in favor of on-demand content.

Ultra high-def TV has been slow to take off, partly because of the high cost of the new-fangled displays and insufficient content. High-definition television took years to become mainstream, after TV prices came down and content became more widely available.

Netflix has said the second season of its popular political drama “House of Cards” was shot and will be available in ultra high-def, becoming one of the first major TV series to take advantage of the technology.

“There are a number of elements that need to work together to create a true 4K experience for customers,” Bill Carr, Amazon vice president of digital video and music, said in a statement.

“You need great content and compatible devices, but you also need a service that can deliver that content to your devices so that it plays beautifully.”

In Monday’s announcement, Amazon also named 20th Century Fox and Discovery among its media partners. It added that it will film all original series slated for 2014 in 4K ultra high-def.

Filed under TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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