Panasonic Exits TV manufacturing

[ncted]

Panasonic, the former plasma king, will no longer make its own TVs

Panasonic was one of the last Japanese companies still manufacturing TVs.

arstechnica.com

 

[navychop]

Equipped with ATSC 4!

 

[harshness]

The story is largely a red herring.

Panasonic hasn't made consumer TVs for the US market since 2016! They stopped building plasmas in 2014. When they returned to the US market in late 2024, they were offering Fire TV units made by TCL under license. The aforementioned Skyworth situation represents a change from one manufacturer to another and maybe a change in panel type.

Skyworth is pretty deep into OLED, while TCL seems to be embracing non-OLED panel technologies.

Like TCL, Skyworth uses Fire TV as its OS. This may be a problem in the US market since NextGen TV's DRM scheme seems to be tied to Google TV.

 

[ncted]

The story is largely a red herring.

Panasonic hasn't made consumer TVs for the US market since 2016! They stopped building plasmas in 2014. When they returned to the US market in late 2024, they were offering Fire TV units made by TCL under license. The aforementioned Skyworth situation represents a change from one manufacturer to another and maybe a change in panel type.

Skyworth is pretty deep into OLED, while TCL seems to be embracing non-OLED panel technologies.

Like TCL, Skyworth uses Fire TV as its OS. This may be a problem in the US market since NextGen TV's DRM scheme seems to be tied to Google TV.

Seems to me it is a lot like what Sony is doing. Design and development will be a partnership, but Skyworth is doing everything else. Previously, Panasonic handled the logistics, marketing, etc., and only the actual manufacturing was outsourced. The headline is fairly inaccurate though.

 

[harshness]

The headline is fairly inaccurate though.

The headline implies that Panasonic has been making its own TVs up until very recently. That is not the case.

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[ncted]

The headline implies that Panasonic has been making its own TVs up until very recently. That is not the case.

Well, to paraphrase a 90s politician, it depends on your definition of "makes" is. Clearly they were not performing the final assembly of the vast majority of their TVs. That doesn't mean they weren't doing some manufacturing of components that went into the TVs in Panasonic factories in Japan. I get your point and agree. Just trying to explain what I think the author of the article was going for.

 

[harshness]

I think the author, like the authors of the other dozen or so articles and blog posts (and reblogs) that appeared that week, didn't want to appear as if they had missed something.

Reblogging is a serious problem.

The other thing that frosts me is when a blog post gets "refreshed" and appears to be presented as fresh research.

 

[Foxbat]

Maybe some hope for Panny fans:

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Sounds akin to Sony's TCL announcement.

 

[Don in CT]

It's been years since I heard the name Panasonic.