Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark
00:00:00 · Dave Haynes
[00:00:00] S0: This is Sixteen:Nine the Podcast. I'm Dave Haynes. Sixteen:Nine has been covering the digital signage industry since the dawn of man, first online and now as a podcast. The goal on here is to make listeners aware of interesting companies, smart people, and new technology developments, All of them meaningful in making digital signage projects happen. I try to help listeners understand sometimes complicated subjects and why they should care. The podcasts are free and I try to get a new one out weekly, but things happen now and then. The Sixteen:Nine podcast has been gratefully sponsored and supported since the start by Jeremy Gavin and the fine folks at Screen Feed, the digital signage content store. Screen Feed makes beautiful looking, totally automated content for signage and digital out of home networks. Check them out at screenfeed.com. Sixteen:Nine has been around since 2006, and the publication and podcast are now owned by Spectreo, which provides customer engagement solutions for business. You can find them at spectreo.com. The UK based research and advisory firm Futuresource Consulting sends a big team every year to the ISE Trade Show in Barcelona and then a few weeks later releases a big report that serves as a technical recap for the ProAV community, both for people who could not attend and for people like me who did, but didn't have anywhere near enough time to see everything. The 2025 report is out now and the good news is that it's a free download. A departure for a company that produces detailed reports that are typically paywalled and tend to cost at least 4 figures. In this podcast, I chat with Ted Romanowitz, a principal consultant focused mainly on LED and Morris or Morris Garrard, who has the pro display file and looks more at LCD and OLED. We get into a bunch of things in a two short thirty minute interview. You'll hear about mass transfer chip on board tech, where chip on glass, also known as micro LED is at, and we also get into LCD, OLED, e paper, and projection. Have a listen. Ted and Miles, thank you for joining me. You guys are from Futuresource Consulting. Every big trade show like an ISE or an InfoComm and some other ones as well, but those are the ones I'm most familiar with. Futuresource sends a whole bunch of people to these shows. I'm curious how many people at Futuresource are on the pro display file.
00:02:17 · Dave Haynes, Ted Romanowitz
And why do you go to trade shows like ISE? [00:02:20] S1: Well, I'm glad to jump in. Thank you again for your time today and looking forward to chatting with you. Overall, we took nearly 20 analysts and business development people to ISE, which shows Futuresource's commitment to the trade show and our clients. But specifically to ProAV, we took four analysts and I'm on the consulting and advisory side. So we had a really good representation across all the technologies projection, flat panel, interactive as well as LED. [00:02:57] S0: And I assume the reason that you go is it's a very efficient way to see a whole bunch of new stuff and touch base with a whole bunch of companies under one roof in a matter of days. [00:03:10] S1: Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, for me, it's just always you walk in and you hit that Hall 3 where a lot of the display companies are. And it just like that first impression you go, Oh my gosh, here we are. [00:03:27] S0: I've got four days. How am [00:03:28] S1: I going to do [00:03:29] S0: all this? [00:03:30] S1: How am I going to do all this? Yes. And it's always nice. I always start at the Lang booth because, you know, they always do a nice job of having that big wow something right there at the the major intersection.
00:03:30 · Ted Romanowitz, Dave Haynes
[00:03:30] S1: How am I going to do all this? Yes. And it's always nice. I always start at the Lang booth because, you know, they always do a nice job of having that big wow something right there at the the major intersection. [00:03:45] S0: Yeah, they've done well with that. One thing about Futuresource is the great majority of the material you put out is understandably paywall. That's your business. You're producing subject matter, expertize reports and selling them. So I'm always a bit curious that the complete one eighty with these post show reports is they're very detailed. There are many, many pages and. It's almost like, boy, that's more than you needed to do. [00:04:21] S1: Yes. Well, I think it's this year was something between forty and fifty pages to cover the many, many different areas of our practices. But yeah, we think it adds value to our clients to see the latest and greatest, you know, what's happening and not just a reporting of, oh, this product announcement or that product announcement, but it provides the context of what's really happening, the undercurrents and the big stories, the technology transitions, if you will, that are happening that are driving shifts in the industry. So that kind of helps us open doors with clients to have the deeper engagements with them based on our unique insights.
00:04:21 · Ted Romanowitz, Morris Garrard, Dave Haynes
[00:04:21] S1: Yes. Well, I think it's this year was something between forty and fifty pages to cover the many, many different areas of our practices. But yeah, we think it adds value to our clients to see the latest and greatest, you know, what's happening and not just a reporting of, oh, this product announcement or that product announcement, but it provides the context of what's really happening, the undercurrents and the big stories, the technology transitions, if you will, that are happening that are driving shifts in the industry. So that kind of helps us open doors with clients to have the deeper engagements with them based on our unique insights. [00:05:11] S2: I think just to add to that as well is we don't produce these show reports solely for the benefit of our clients. We also work with an extensive research network that benefits from these show reports, as well as other industry bodies that we work with, like trade associations, for example, and our channel partners as well. [00:05:34] S0: And it's a way, obviously, that driving awareness of of the sort of work that you guys do and what what what is possible kind of behind the paywall. [00:05:46] S2: Exactly that. Yeah. It's a it's a brilliant opportunity to raise our profile and also to raise the profile of the analysts working within these product sectors as well.
00:05:46 · Morris Garrard, Dave Haynes
[00:05:46] S2: Exactly that. Yeah. It's a it's a brilliant opportunity to raise our profile and also to raise the profile of the analysts working within these product sectors as well. [00:05:54] S0: So we we're already four minutes in and I've got about half an hour to chat with you guys. So we should dive straight into some of what you saw and came away with. And I would say the the biggest thing is probably LED and in the context of Pro Display anyway, so we'll skip on past audio and some of those other areas. You talked a lot in the report about mass transfer chip on board. Can you, first of all, describe what that is? Because, you know, we're in an industry that's, you know, overwhelmed by acronyms and why that's important and what's the distinction? Why are you saying mass transferred when you're prefacing COB with mass transferred?
00:06:45 · Ted Romanowitz
[00:06:45] S1: Yes. And not only are there a lot of acronyms, Dave, but the problem is, is that terms are being misused Indeed. I've heard you talk about that a little bit, perhaps. But it's a really strategic inflection point that's happening right now, literally right in front of our very eyes at ISE, where you're shifting from packaged LED technologies that have driven the industry for twenty years. So where the LED red, blue, green are packaged and then picked and placed onto a PCB. Well, that's shifting to package list technologies where the individual chiplets, red, blue, green, are being mass transferred. So instead of one pixel at a time, they're doing thousands. And when you think about it in context, a four ks display is over 8,200,000 pixels. So if you can transfer thousands at once instead of one by one, you save a lot of time. And so this package list technologies like chip on board, where the backplane is a PCB and it's a passive driver and then chip on glass or what we call microLED, truly microLED, that is sub 100 microns mass transferred onto a TFT backplane with an active driver. So at ISE, you saw this crazy tidal wave, I'm going to go with that term, this crazy tidal wave of companies that are announcing COB. And the biggest thing is that they're coming to the fruition of manufacturing processes so that they can mass transfer instead of pick and place. So the cost is gonna be a lot less to make them. First of all, because you don't have to package first, then pick and place. And then secondly, because you can mass transfer. So we expect this is gonna, within maybe the next twelve months following, this could drive up to a 50% decrease in the ASP's average sales price of 1.5 millimeter and below. It's just truly amazing. You know, we've been hearing about this for several years. Futuresource has been writing about it and now it's happening right before our eyes.