LG unleashes its annual flood of announcements
Holding down its traditional CES-opening spot at 8:00 am, LG on Wednesday ran through a dizzying number of announcements across multiple product lines.
Life is good indeed for the Korea-based electronics giant, which reported $13.2 billion in revenues for 2008, up 16% year-to-year. Speaking to the press mob, CEO Michael Ahn said that the firm means to spend the recession building on recent advances in consumer awareness. (The company reports that LG now has 92.3% brand recognition among polled consumers, up from 83% in 2007 and 75% the year before.) There will be, he said, no cuts in R&D or in marketing.
The folks in charge of building third-party alliances should feel comfortable too, as LG announced deals with YouTube and Yahoo Widgets for video content, with CinemaNow for high-def pay-per-view offerings, with Kenwood and Delphi among others) for their ATSC mobile gear, and with Waste Management Inc. for a recycling plan in which consumers can drop off any defunct LG gear at local Waste Management eCycling Centers for recycling.
LG has a tendency to throw an immense number of products at the wall during this press conference, and the pace this year was once again dizzying. (One should perhaps be grateful that they didn't delve into, say, the washer-dryer product line.)
Even listing the announcements is daunting. Among the highlights (though not all products were demonstrated this morning) for 2009: the first ATSC DTV MP3 player with a 3-inch touchscreen display; new LED backlight display tech that jacks contrast ratios to 2,000,000:1; TruMotion 240Hz technology, which reduces image smearing and virtually eliminates motion blur; broadband TVs with Netflix streaming capabilities built right into the set; two new Blu-Ray disc players and three new Blu-Ray home theater systems (two of the latter for Q2 2009); a NAS (network storage device) with built-in Blu-ray.
The green revolution was a major focus Wednesday morning, as it has been throughout CES so far. LG announced that its 2009 HDTVs are being designed to achieve the newest Energy Star 3.0 rating. The company is rolling out the "Life's Green 2020" initiative, which will cut greenhouse gas emissions by two points in the product lifecycle -- in the manufacturing process, where the company aims to cut emissions by 150 kilotons/year by 2020, and with the products themselves, for an additional decrease of 30 megatons/year by 2020.
One of the few products to get more than a few sentences of introduction may be coming to your town soon, but it's not likely you're in the market. The LG Skycharger, a solar- and wind-powered charging station, can handle up to 104 phones (of various makes, not only LG) in its lockable cubbyholes, dispensing up to 1.8 kilowatts of power among them. Drop a gadget off and it'll be charged in about an hour; unused power goes into the station's battery bank in case it gets both calm and dark.
Who's buying? Think large outdoor venues...or disaster-recovery agencies. The Skycharger will, according to the company, be making a US tour in 2009. It's the first of its kind in the nation.