Will the Super Bowl really drive HDTV sales?

Interesting data from Retrevo regarding drivers for the purchase of an HDTV in the short-term. According to their latest Pulse Report, price beats the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics in a big way as the key driver for buying an HDTV. Furthermore, about half of consumers in this study weren't aware of whether they would be able to watch the Winter Olympics in high-definition. Yeesh...seems like NBC has a lot of work to do.

Parks Associates survey identifies impact of education and income on consumer PC purchase habits

For each $1,000 in income, U.S. households will pay on average $1 more for a PC, according to the Consumer Decision Process Annual Survey, which has quantified the influence of income and education on the amount consumers spend on specific CE products.

International research firm Parks Associates recently completed this survey of over 5,000 U.S. consumers on their 2008 purchases and 2009 purchase intentions. The research, part of the Consumer Decision Process Service, examines ownership and attitudes toward product categories such as PCs, MP3 players, LCD and connected TVs, home networks, and Blu-ray players.

Results from the survey show that consumers with a graduate degree spend, on average, $100 more for a computer than consumers with only a high-school degree. Income levels also affect the final price for computers, as households with $200,000 in annual income spend over $150 more for a laptop compared to households with $50,000 in annual income.

“The prices consumers pay for PCs and laptops are remarkably elastic, especially when compared to products such as DVD players, game consoles, and home networks, where prices are basically flat across different income and educational groups,” said John Barrett, director, research, Parks Associates. “These results allow us to measure the impact of specific consumer attributes, such as level of education, and use that to predict both the products consumers are interested in and how much they’ll pay for certain items.”

For example, Barrett says, higher-income households would be more willing to pay a little extra for a better laptop, whereas they see less value in paying extra for a high-end DVD player. As a result, high- and low-income households pay basically the same for a DVD player.

Tricia Parks, CEO, Parks Associates, and Vipin Jain, CEO, Retrevo, presented research from the Consumer Decision Process Annual Survey on June 3 at CONNECTIONS™: The Digital Living Conference & Showcase. Their presentation, Navigating the Changing CE Purchase Process, discussed the impact of the recession and the need for flexibility in selling CE to consumers, especially as the power of brand has diminished.

For the full press release, click here.

AT&T's ConnecTech - Tech Support

When people ask me about which particular segments of the digital lifestyle market will continue to grow despite our current economic conditions, one area that I continually point out are the digital home tech support services. These can include the retail-based services (best known by Geek Squad), the remote PC support space, warranty services, home network management software, security services (Symantec, McAfee, Radialpoint, F-Secure, etc.), remote management and residential gateway software providers (2Wire, Cisco, Jungo/NDS, etc.) and even pre-purchase/subscription advice services like Retrevo.

There was an interesting article in Smart Money this past week about the tech support market, with some pretty significant numbers provided. I estimate that the remote PC support business in 2008 was already $650 million - just in the U.S.! Others put Geek Squad's business at between $1 and $2 billion!

There are plenty of third-party services that are out there, but I'm really intrigued by what service providers can be doing to add value to basic broadband and television service offerings, increase customer satisfaction, and even build new revenue streams. We've written about the opportunities for service providers to take advantage of the digital home tech support space in several recent reports, notably Enabling Solutions for a Rich Broadband Experience and Networks in the Home: The Global Service Provider Play. We also had an interesting conversation at our CONNECTIONS™ Summit at CES about the evolution of tech support services. Bill Stanley from Telcordia followed up that panel with some responses to additonal questions I asked about how they are working with the service provider industry.

What I find interesting about the way that service providers are approaching the tech support space is that vendors are telling me that their conversations have moved away from the folks who are in charge of the customer support call centers and to the people heading up marketing efforts. I think that this may provide a clue as to how these services are being positioned within the service provider community - more as revenue-generating services than cost-saving efforts. We shouldn't downplay the role that enhanced customer support tools are going to play in helping to reduce call center volume and costs - I think that OPEX savings are going to be a critical element to making the service provider business more efficient. On the other hand, I think that some forward-thinking service providers see a real opportunity to create some new businesses that focus on helping their subscribers deal with the complexities of the digital home.

Starting with BT's Home IT Advisor service, I'm seeing more telcos get into the business of deploying tech support services. The most recent offering is AT&T's ConnecTech service, which has been advertised heavily in Dallas - I seem to hear their radio commercial every morning on my drive to work. ConnecTech is aimed at consumers, whereas their Tech Support 360 provides support for small and medium businesses. Among the services offered ConnecTech are:

• PC and home network installation;
• Computer services and in-home support;
• Television and home theater set-up and consultation; and
• Phone and remote support.

Verizon also has Expert Care is a subscription-based ($14.99/month) service for PC support. They also have put together a number of "Protection Paks" that include insurance/replacement services for consumer electronics, phone, and other home equipment (in the case of a power surge, for example).

Verizon actually cites our numbers about the number of U.S. households that experience a PC-related problem in any given year - 41 million households experiencing issues with Internet security, 20 million+ having problems with home PC hardware and software, etc. Those figures were generated in our 2006 survey Managing the Digital Home: Installation and Support Services. We are about to go to field with our next study on consumers and technical support services: Customer Support in the Digital Home. I'm really interested to see what the consumer demand is for a variety of tech support services.

Hot CE Products in 2009? Ask Retrevo

I guess it's obligatory that we in the analyst and press community need to come up with our "Top-Whatever" lists of the key trends, key products, etc. from either the year just ending or for 2009. It definitely does help to distill the main news and hot items for the year into some easily digestible deliverables ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show next week. In fact, the Parks Associates' analysts got together a couple of weeks ago to deliver a Webcast titled 2008: A Digital Lifestyles Year in Review, and I'll be delivering a Webcast on January 22 titled Key Trends in Consumer Electronics that will focus on the big things we saw and heard at CES.

It's easier of course to make some well-educated guesses about what's about to happen with good data available. That's why we're so active in our consumer research. And, when you look at a company like Retrevo, they've got a wealth of information available to them about what consumers are looking for in consumer electronics. The company does a lot for the buying public, but basically, they distill the tons of information, reviews, prices, etc. about a host of CE products and deliver the information to likely buyers in a much more manageable way. I think highly of what Retrevo does, and blogged about them in 2007 as I discussed how I think customer support for the digital home will evolve beyond just fixing broken products and services after they are purchased/installed and become a much more holistic offering that includes things like pre-purchase advice and suggestions for upgrades to existing products. In this way, retailers, service providers, and product manufactuers can play a much more proactive role in providing solutions to their customers at all stages of the buying and support process. It's an addition to a Customer Support Lifecyle notion that is pictured at the beginning of this blog.

Retrevo has some cool features that leverage the data it's able to collect about the CE buying public. In October, they announced Retrevo Pulse™. This consists of the CE Price Index™, CE Demand Index™ and a real-time product buzz ticker. The indices track daily price and demand trends for consumer electronics by product category and in aggregate based on data for more than 4,000 products across 40 categories, such as HDTV’s, digital cameras and laptop computers.

In yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle, Retrevo is noted as using its data to name the most sought-after consumer electronics products of 2008 and predicting the winners and losers in 2009. Retrevo put out their own press release on their Retrevo Pulse Awards. These commendations go to products "that have been recognized for high quality, generating a high level of demand among consumers, rich feature sets, and most importantly, high value."

Best products for 2008 - based on quality, value and consumer demand - include specific models of Samsung and Panasonic LCD TVs, Canon and Nikon digital cameras, a Garmin Nuvi Global Positioning System device and an Asus Eee PC.

Hot products for 2009 will be home theater systems, netbooks, digital cameras, high-definition televisions and Blu-ray DVD players, Jain said, partly because people are buying them over the holidays despite the bad economy and partly because these products will continue to technically advance.