Australian consumer electronics retailers and vendors, selling Smart TV’s and tablets, who do not invest in fast broadband services inside retail stores, are denying both themselves and their customers “a good technology experience,” a senior Telstra executive has said.Ben Kinealy, the head of Telstra IPTV and BigPond TV believes that the lack of “good” broadband in retail stores is losing retailers business. “It’s a big issue” he said.
He added: “Both retailers and vendors, who are selling Smart TVs tablets and other technology devices that link with the Internet, have to realise that fast broadband is critical to the selling process. US retailers get it, unfortunately Australian retailers don’t get it yet” said Kinealy, who has just returned from the USA where he saw the way that retailers were selling Smart TVs and other devices.
“The in-store experience in the USA is excellent, stores have their products set up so that they can easily demonstrate subscription TV, download services and applications running on a variety of devices,” he said.
During a recent retail tour of 12 Sydney stores by ChannelNews, only 12 percent were able to demonstrate live content streaming over the Internet.
Kinealy said that several vendors who are looking to sell Smart TV services linked to either a TV, Blu ray player, or media centre are going to struggle to sell their product if they allow their products to be sold in environments where there is no or limited broadband services.
A senior LG executive at yesterday’s launch told ChannelNews that the lack of broadband was an issue for the industry. “We even had trouble setting our display for the media presentation because the broadband connection was slow” they said.
