No More KURO?

Last Friday several outlets, including our friends over at HDGuru.com, broke a story about Pioneer leaving the TV business.

What does this mean for the rest of the market?

Well, it depends on how you look at it. On one hand, you could see this as one less manufacturer in a crowded market. The potential sales Pioneer would have had will go to other companies. The real story, however, is deeper than that.

Pioneer positioned itself as a maker of high-end, high-performance TVs. There was near universal praise of the KURO plasmas for their outstanding picture quality.

Regardless of anything else, it gave engineers at other companies a sort of wake-up call saying "well this is what we're doing, match it." As a side note, this is actually how the KURO project was launched. The Pioneer engineers saw the SED prototype, and knew they had to compete.

Now this isn't to say that there won't still be competition among the rest of the brands. Samsung and Sony will still go at it. As will others.

But having such a clear and highly praised leader in one aspect, and one that was selling to a high end market, was good for the industry.  In conversations I've had with a few friends in the industry, they feel the same way.

What I'm sure many are going to revel in, is that there is now one less plasma producer, and therefore, all hail LCD. I've never understood this knee-jerk reaction against a specific technology.

Especially one that is so irrelevant. There are good TVs and bad TVs made with each technology, and everything from one technology is bad is remarkably close minded. I've been accused by some as being a "plasma fanboy," yet I think there are plenty of fantastic LCDs on the market. Something that many in the "LCD fanboy" camp won't concede about their least favorite tech.

The KUROs were (ok, are) definitely great TVs. Losing that potential choice in the market, should be disapointing to all.

While from a picture quality and choice point of view, this is a sad event, it is doubtful it will have too much of an impact on the production of plasmas on a whole. Even if you take the number of TVs Pioneer was making out of the equation, it means little for "plasmas" on a whole, at least from a manufacturing standpoint. For that matter, this was going to happen anyway as Panasonic started making glass for Pioneer.

Ah Panasonic. All eyes turn to you. While other companies make plasmas, none are more visible than Panasonic. Their 2009 lineup includes 14,323 different models of plasma TVs. They can make more plasmas in a month than Pioneer was making in a year. Ok, that's a slight exaggeration, but the point is valid. Panasonic has a profitable business in plasma, which makes any discussion of LCD "winning" some imaginary technology war even more irrelevant. If you can make money making "A," and see a future making more money making "A," then why do you care what "B" is doing? (For the record, they also make lots of "B's.")

Some like to create a conflict where there isn't one. A "Chevy vs. Ford" mentality. While on a grand scale this is valid (say, Panasonic vs. Sony) it isn't valid on a technology scale. Panasonic wants to sell more TVs than Sony, Samsung wants to sell more TVs than everybody, and so on. They don't really care what that TV is as long as it sells.

I'll do a future blog post on why there are more LCD manufacturers than plasma, it's probably not why you think.

It should be noted, that as I write this, the demise of Pioneer's TV business is just rumor. Pioneer released a kind of non-denial denial where they said: "we have publicly announced that we are actively evaluating our business.  We started announcing changes in March, 2008 to increase efficiencies of our business operations.  We are still in that process but do not have any further announcements at this time."

So maybe they'll pull through. But somehow I doubt it.

Which is sad. Not least of which, the loss of the best looking flat panel ever made, but also such a sign of the times.

For my next blog, I promise something more upbeat, or at least inflammatory.