dvrbulletin.com

You’ve probably seen it by now.

What looks like a commercial for a new TV show or movie, turns out to be a commercial for a line of HDTV sets from LG called Scarlet. (Check out the video below if you haven’t seen it already.)

It seems like it was a successful campaign, in that it garnered lots of press attention including a red-carpet fake premiere with (fake) celebrities and lots of mentions on the Internet.

However, I’m more interested in the fact that this is one of the first TVs that are branded. And it’s about time. Everything else around us has branded names. Think of cars (Toyota Avalon, Ford Taurus), MP3 players (iPod, Zune), cell phones (LG’s Chocolate, Motorola’s Razr or the iPhone)–heck even condoms have brand names (Trojan, Magnum). So it’s about time that TV sets are becoming brands that consumers can identify.

LG’s Scarlet line of sets don’t really push the bar as far as new or advanced features, it just has a good brand name. And the back of the TV is red, too. So it doesn’t take much beyond lots of advertising dollars, an online viral marketing campaign, and a new product to begin promoting a new brand.

Why aren’t other TV set manufacturer’s doing this? I mean, Sony, which came up with Walkman, and Vaio, should have a good TV brand. Panasonic does have the Viera line of TV sets, but it reminds me too much of Good Morning America’s Meredith Viera to really have a brand impact with me.

Having a name like Scarlet, also makes it easy for consumers to find reviews and prices on the Internet. You don’t have to remember that the Scarlet is product number AZTX-4208, for example. (I just made that up.) Just Google “Scarlet” and TV and up comes results to help you shop and compare.

Brands. It’s what people want. People share with others what brand their new cell phone is. And consumer electronic manufacturers should realize that people want to show off their new HDTVs also. And let’s include DVRs also. Tivo has done pretty well as the top brand of DVRs, but distinguishing different product lines is kind of tricky. Tivo’s Series 2, or Series 3 DVRs are boring names. Why not the Tivo Magum? Or um, something like that.

[tags] Tivo, LG, Scarlet, branding, advertising, HDTV, TV [/tags]

Sony said that it is dropping support from regular DVDs from its DVRs and only supporting its Blu-Ray format. This is for their upcoming DVR lines in Japan.

Dropping support for DVDs means that consumers will have to upgrade and buy the new Blu-Ray discs if they want to archive shows that they’ve recorded. Now that’s great news for those looking to store more movies in each disc and good news for the growing number of HDTV users. But it’s bad news for people still clinging to their DVD collections.

Coolest Gadgets says that support Blu-Ray offers much more storage:

“[a] …50GB Blu-ray disc is capable of holding slightly more than 4 hours of HDTV whenever one records over-the-air MPEG2 stream, but transcoding this stream to MPEG4 AVC makes it possible to cram in up to 16 hours of HDTV onto the same disc. “

It will probably also raise prices since the new recordable HD drives are more expensive than regular DVD recordable drives. I guess it’s great that Sony is very forward thinking, but here in the U.S. many people are still using regular DVDs and haven’t made the transition to HD discs.

But what about support for HD-DVD? Looks like the battle between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray is heating up.