Hasta La Gadget!

While Dish Network’s $25.5 billion bid for Sprint continues to wave in the breeze, the company has reported its earnings for the first quarter. Net subscriber growth only totaled 36,000 compared to 104,000 in the same period last year, as subscriber churn rose due to a price hike earlier this year. Its profits were lower in Q1 2013 than 2012 partially due to Blockbuster-related drops and a boost received last year from its DBSD purchase. (We’re guessing higher content costs for things like AMC didn’t help either.) A growing percentage of the 654,000 new customers it added got Hopper DVRs, which also raised costs a bit for the new set-top boxes and all those TV advertisements its been running. Even as it waits to add some terrestrial LTE to its “Seinfeld” wireless data strategy, the dishNET satellite broadband service added 66,000 customers in the quarter, up from from just 6,000 new customers in Q1 2012. We’ll have to wait for the earnings call at noon to see if CEO Charlie Ergen has anything else to say about its battle with Softbank to buy Sprint, but all of the data is in the press release and slide below.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD

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Source: Dish Network Q1 2013 investor summary (PDF), Q1 Earnings

The OUYA game console is shifting its launch from June 4th to June 25th, the company revealed in a press release this morning. Speaking with our friends at Joystiq, CEO Julie Uhrman explained the decision to push the console’s retail launch back as a measure of keeping up with retail demand. “We’ve had incredibly positive reactions from our retail partners,” Uhrman said. The date shift, “will allow us to create more units and, basically, have more units on store shelves.”

The company also revealed that it’s altering the existing controller’s button holes to ensure that retail buyers don’t run into the same sticking issue that Kickstarter backers have been dealing with. And despite those two pieces of news sounding an awful lot like they’re connected (the delay and the controller alteration), Uhrman claims they’re not. “We made that change very early so all the units are being produced with those larger button holes,” she said. At this point, it’s not clear if OUYA will hook up early backers with a new controller upon request (or perhaps just new faceplates), but we’ve asked for more information.

Filed under: Gaming, HD

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Quad-core smart TVs? Move over, Samsung and Haier, because another company’s now joining the party. At a press event in Beijing yesterday, Chinese video content provider LeTV announced its first TV series dubbed “Super TV.” Despite the cheesy name, there are a handful of big names behind it: Kai-Fu Lee’s Innovation Works, Qualcomm, Foxconn and Sharp. The last two aren’t surprising considering Foxconn’s parent company, Hon Hai, is an investor of Sharp as well as LeTV. It’s also worth noting, though, that Hon Hai already has a deal with RadioShack to make and sell a 60-inch TV, the RS60-V1, in China since January.

The flagship X60 (pictured above at GMIC Beijing) features an aluminum alloy body that encases Sharp’s 10th-generation 60-inch 1080p panel — as featured on the RadioShack TV — with 120Hz 3D, on top of a 1.7GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 Prime MPQ8064 (with 2GB of RAM and Adreno 320 graphics), dual-band WiFi and S/PDIF optical output. You can also add an optional 2.4GHz gyroscopic remote control and a PrimeSense motion sensor just for giggles. But most importantly, LeTV now streams over 2,000 TV apps as well as some 90,000 TV episodes and 5,000 movies for free (LeTV claims to own the rights to 95 percent of the video content). So, the ¥6,999 or $1,140 price tag seems a steal for the X60. There will also be a 39-inch 1080p (likely 2D only), dual-core S40 model priced at ¥1,999 or about $330, and both TVs will be available by the end of June.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD

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Via: Engadget Chinese

Source: LeTV

Sony’s already got a low barrier to entry for developers on its PlayStation Mobile platform, which encompasses the PlayStation Vita handheld game console and a variety of smartphones — just $99 for a license enables publishing across all PlayStation Mobile devices. Apparently that fee is too much for some folks, so Sony’s waving it altogether. Starting right now (as of yesterday, actually), Sony’s “removing any existing barriers” between developers and the PS Mobile platform by dropping the publishing fee, thusly making it all the easier for devs to push their games to the Vita and various smartphones. There are already some great indie games featured on Sony’s PS Mobile store, including Vlambeer’s Super Crate Box and Super Icon Ltd.’s Life of Pixel, and this paves the way for even more.

Of course, Apple’s iOS publishing fee is $99 per year and the App Store is certainly more flush with content than Sony’s Mobile store, which tells us it isn’t the license fee that’s stopping people from pushing their games to PS Mobile.

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds, Software, HD, Sony

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Source: US PlayStation Blog, EU PlayStation Blog

Following a tweak in how Nielsen defines homes with TVs, it’s noted a reversal in the two-year decline of TV household numbers. This adjustment has apparently increased Nielsen‘s estimate of TV homes by 1.2 percent, up to 115.6 million. The definition now extends to include viewers that take their TV through broadband internet, with qualifying households having both the high-speed connection and “at least one operable TV/monitor with the ability to deliver video.” This new wording encompasses anyone who watches channels through their Xbox, Apple TV and other data-based services. Nielsen will begin including these extra homes in its sampling starting in September, but we’re still waiting to see what it does with its wider metrics for both streaming viewers and social networks.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Internet, HD

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Source: Nielsen