Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark
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.
00:09:31 · Dave Haynes, Ted Romanowitz
[00:09:31] S0: And with COB, there are other inherent advantages as well, right? I mean, the first one would be that as they're manufactured, they the finished modules have some sort of protective coating on them. That's just kind of fundamental to how they do them versus SMD. It's kind of the more the older school packaged LED displays where they're unprotected unless they've got this glue on board coating and therefore they're more prone to damage. [00:10:03] S1: Yes, exactly. And those processes have been kind of perfected over the last two to three years. So not only can you do a nice job of encapsulating it, but they can repair the LEDs as well, even after encapsulation. So that's a major thing that's happening. And one of the things that I saw at the show was i5LED actually had a double difficult display that they did in the sense that it's a corner, an inside corner, which is difficult to do with LED to get the, you know, so there's not any like seams or anything. But then the second thing they did is they put a touch overlay on an encapsulated COB display so you could touch. It had, you know, multi touch on it. So again, really, really interesting to see the future of what's happening. [00:11:06] S0: Yeah, because touch and LED were kind of different worlds for the longest time. And it's only been recently where you start to see IR frames around displays that that would make them interactive and you wouldn't want to touch a conventional SMB display because it was going to damage it, right?