Gadgetory

hey guys the verge I'm here with Matt McRae the CTO visio and here we're here with the new P series which is a thousand dollar 4k TV you guys nacet in CES it's a little about nine or ten months later and here we are so what first of all what took so long we want to get it right yeah so you know we showed our demos at CES and you know we're showing a lot of picture processing demos here and we want to make sure that the resolution was right the motion capture was right the color was right so it's really been just fine-tuning the details and not only ship an amazingly priced 4k TV but one that actually closed away the competition on the picture quality so that's the big question how did you make $1,000 15 4k TV when everyone else is like $2,000 $4,000 what's the secret here well it wasn't easy we spent a lot of time doing engineering work specific to our product so probably the biggest thing we did is we developed our own back lights so we you know talked about that at CES where we do full ray local dimming across all our product lines and by designing them ourselves we were able to not only raise the picture quality but actually lower the price how wait how does all that work let you lower the price if you're doing all that engineering work because of component price so yeah we spent a lot of engineering time and development effort but the actual component price and the innovation that we did was to create a full array local dimming right where we got LEDs going all the way through the backlight but actually reduce the component count by 40% at the same time so there's a lot of integration happening where you know the where the glass meets the LEDs meets the driver boards we were able to reduce that overall cost through that innovation and again you the picture quality goes up but cost goes down it's a big question with 4k is how are you gonna get content and you guys are betting almost exclusively on streaming right yeah we've decided since you know since our first Smart TVs launched six years ago that streaming was going to be one of the primary ways people are going to get any content and we've streamed you know billions of hours of video content to our Smart TVs now and 4k is not gonna be different so there will be 4k blu-ray players in the future there will be 4k set-top boxes in the future this has hdmi 2.0 and we support all that but we do believe that one of the many ways and probably the primary way people will get content are going to be from sources like Netflix and Amazon and ultra flicks and some of the partners we've announced today and we had a demo in the other room and you can see that it's it's pretty nice I mean at 10 to 15 megabits per second is gorgeous and that that's what you need right otherwise you get a little too compressed yeah it starts at about 9 point something almost 10 megabits per second and then the steps up all the way to 15 and by the time you're at 12 to 15 megabits per second it is substantially better than 1080p really and is that you think it's going to be as good as on disk it'll be a little bit different you'll see different artifacts it won't be quite as good as a disc because a bit rate will be so much higher but it's already showing a massive upgrade against what you're seeing on 1080p and remember you know it's not just going from 7 megabits a second on 1080p to 15 on 4k a doubling of it because we're also using HEV C which is a much more you know compressed formats a new format for extreme unis you're getting the double of the bandwidth but you're also getting another doubling of efficiency so it's actually four times the effective throughput and it looks really good and you're building your own ships too we are so we have the Vizio v6 processor which is a six core processor we're using to do all this and we have the VM 50 which is our picture processing engine that's doing all of the color fidelity the contrasts are pixel mapping and everything that we're doing and we that was the other way that we decided even though we take a little bit more time but to not only beat people on price but beat him on picture quality we had we had to actually bring our own technology to market so I mean that's the question once you start talking about processors and cores that kind of technology and a TV I get worried about like how long until I have to replace it with a faster processor and a faster you have a better picture pixel engine and better software what how long do you think this season lasts it'll last a long time you know the chips that we can buy off-the-shelf we're dual-core yeah this is six cores yeah so again one of our choices was actually put more horsepower than we need today to make it a platform that can last quite a while you know the investment like you keep mentioning how do you guys do it how you guys do it there was definitely a very large upfront investment but we're not passing that on to consumers of investment we made not only for this TV but future TVs so we're spreading that very small across all the platforms so first TVs got flattened everybody rushed out and bought new form factors and then there's been this desperate search for the next thing that's gonna make everybody buy again don't say curved curved then there's 3d you guys have taken 3d completely out of the picture now you're just giving up in 3d well so what I'll tell you is we one of these we pride ourselves on is really listening and watching consumers but listening to what they really want in a television so there was actually two reasons one is we looked at how many people are actually using our 3d TVs how many people actually thought that was a very important feature set it was pretty low also if you look at the 4k if you do 4k right if you do ultralinks calorie already and kind of look at and say is that 3d and it's because the depth that we're able to produce through the picture processing so for us putting our investment resources right towards improving the picture quality not in a 2d but making it so clear and the motion resolution is so good that it actually looks 3d was much more important you get to curves and things like that you know again our opinion is curved as a gimmick it actually hurts picture quality it causes a lot of problems so you won't see us too curved we try and find a way to actually improve the users experience and charge them less not figure out how to make their experience worse and charge them more so for us it's complete opposite of what we focus on so do you think 4k is going to kick off another adoption cycle is that why you price so low to like get to the front line well I think what would have happened without Vizio is we would have seen maybe a three to four year maybe five year even transition cycle from 1080p to 4k at least on you know 50-inch in above where you can really tell the difference our goal is to try and make that transition you know one to two years yeah and get most people buying 4k TVs at those sizes by next year and hopefully this year we're already going to go to a big chunk of market so one of the things Vizio thinks we like to do is actually drive transitions faster is use disruptive technology to get people the latest technology technology maybe they thought they couldn't afford now and that's part of the pricing strategy is to take that market by storm right so we talk to you about times it's this feels like refocusing on the core Visio which is always from televisions you've diversified a few places you're in soundbars doing really well there but you did laptops for a minute we've played with phones is this Vizio coming all the way back to TVs you're gonna do even keep trying to brought now yeah a bit what I would say is this took a lot of effort yeah so for the last probably year and a half two years we've actually spent a bulk of our resources perfecting UHD and again making it making sure we hit the prices that we want to hit but really setting a new bar for quality we think it's really really important so that has been the bulk of it also our sound bars and our audio equipment you know we're the number one sound bar manufacturer as well that's been a big focus but I think what you could say fairly is that the last year and a half at least from an engineering R&D side we decided that there was some really cool technology coming forward and that focusing on the living room again was really important because we saw this transition coming having said that you know you'll see some interesting stuff coming in the next year or two that I can't talk about so we won't predominantly stay in the living room but it was important to actually take a leadership position in UHD and continue that position in audio as well why do you deliver he was getting interesting in because of the court case transition no one's practice right everyone's still poking around the edges of it how how are you guys going to maintain that leader leadership position use every analysis coming at you cuz they're all gonna keep coming at you yeah I'd want the best way and the reason we spent so much time on this is quality you know you can try and be the best price forever and that's great and it's you know it'll decline quick and that's something we do naturally anyways is priced aggressively that's that's great but that can also be fleeting what really matters is is actually shipping a world-class product so if you if you have a world-class product where you've actually beaten you know products that are twice as expensive as you you're gonna have staying power and you're going to actually you know have a pretty good chunk of that market so we're we have a good initial foray with these and you're going to see us continue to innovate in UHD and again our goal is to get people to transition into an ultra high def living room quickly so the last question will cost product the other TV shared CS was the reference series yes what's the timeline on that coming soon can't tell you exactly we're perfecting that as well yeah a lot of probably not shipping it's going to be really close and so we may actually wait a little bit longer give us some breathing room but a lot of the fine tuning that went into P series is going in our reference series and then we have a whole nother order of magnitude that we're doing for that product and it's it's a it's beautiful I can't say too much but you know the demos we showed at CES on the reference series was we're pretty jaw-dropping and it's only gotten much better from there also reference series you know we want to make sure that you know when we launch the P series we want to make sure there was contact right so you know Netflix has great content we've got Amazon and ultra fix klemming so even if you don't have a 4k blu-ray player yet there's a lot of content on the reference series we're doing the same thing where we want to make sure that there's high dynamic range ultra wide color gamut content when we launch and you know some of that stuff's being created and mastered right now so we don't want to launch a TV and then not have content to actually show with it so it's another reason why maybe waiting a few months would would make more sense yeah so this guy's thousand dollars thousand dollars 99 the big one is how they even have the 65 inch is $21.99 and this 70 inches $24.99 that's aggressive and these are going to be a source now yeah actually a few websites are already selling them live there's some pre-orders of a few stuck out and our retailers will have them starting tomorrow but some are already on the shelf any legal team on the stock what I think's going to happen based on what we're seeing online is that we're going to sell out for a while and then we've got a whole another huge boatload coming and that's when we'll kick off our advertising things like that in October Osman Matt McRae Vizio e-series thousand dollars 4k awesome thanks you're welcome