Kevin Yeaman
Analyst · Dougherty
Thanks, Murray. Good afternoon, everyone. As we look across the entertainment and consumer electronics landscape, we see a continued proliferation in both the way we receive our content and play it back. Today, consumers can receive content through broadcast, optical disc, online, and mobile, as well as cinema. They can also play back their content on a wider range of devices, including tablets and handsets. Yet the audio experience across these devices and through some of these channels, such as online and mobile, is often inconsistent and degraded. This creates the opportunity to leverage our portfolio of technologies and expertise to deliver a more immersive and consistent audio experience across all of these channels and devices. This will ensure that consumers get the best experience regardless of how they choose to receive their contents. On today's call, I would like to highlight the developments and changes taking place across the different channels of content distribution and discuss how we are positioning Dolby's formats and technologies in each. Starting with the broadcast channel distribution, we continue to see the transition to digital television and high-definition TV taking place globally. In the Asia Pacific region, China finalized its national digital TV standard, which includes Dolby Digital Plus as an optional format. We believe this helps set the stage for the transition to digital television and the adoption of our technologies in China. As with the case in North America and Europe, our inclusion in the Chinese digital TV standard was due in part to our ability to get our format into local content. In China, we've also seen a high percentage of the country's high-definition channels on air using our technologies. In preparation for the transition to digital broadcast, we recently signed agreements with 2 Chinese TV OEMs, TCL and Skyworth. We are taking a similar approach in India with early success as Dolby's technologies have been adopted by Tata Sky, Airtel digital TV and Star TV. And in Eastern Europe, Poland's national public broadcaster, TVP, began transmitting in Dolby Digital Plus across the country's most popular terrestrial broadcast channel. We have been providing increased support to broadcasters and geographies where digital TV standards are in development and where commercial high-definition channels are being deployed. Getting in local broadcast standards and content eventually leads to the inclusion of our technologies in TV and set-top box units where we generate the majority of our broadcast revenue. Today, we estimate that our fiscal 2011 global TV attach rate is on track to reach approximately 60%, up approximately 7 points from last fiscal year. In addition, our global set-top box attach rate is on track to be just under 40% in fiscal 2011. As we support the global transition to digital broadcast, we are delivering an integrated solution, including Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby Pulse, which makes it easier for television and set-top box manufacturers around the world to support broadcast and file-based content with the highest quality audio experience. Now let me turn to the distribution platform of optical disc, where our technologies are a standard in both DVD and Blu-ray. We continue to see Blu-ray perform fairly well in the market for stand-alone players, which is on track to show approximately 60% year-on-year unit growth this fiscal year. This is being driven by falling price points from Blu-ray players, increased Blu-ray content and improved online feature sets in players. However, Blu-ray is largely growing at the expense of traditional DVD, and we continue to see traditional stand-alone DVD units decline year-over-year. In the PC market, the broad adoption of optical drives has driven the inclusion of Dolby technologies on many of the world's PC shipments. We work with operating system providers, ISVs and OEMs to support DVD on the PC. In recent years, our mix of PC licensing revenue has increasingly shifted towards the operating system as our technologies are included in 4 editions of Windows 7. However, we have recently learned that our technologies are not currently included in the Windows 8 operating system under development. If our technologies are not included in the commercial version of Windows 8, we expect to support DVD playback functionality by increasingly licensing our technologies directly to OEMs and ISVs, and we will seek to extend our technologies to further support online content playback. It's important to note that DVD playback remains a fundamental component to most PC shipments worldwide. While we work with the industry to support DVD playback in its PC shipments, it is equally important that we continue to extend our formats to channels of delivery beyond DVD. This will help ensure the relevance of our technologies to the PC long term. By doing this, we believe we can help consumers receive a high-quality consistent playback experience on their PC regardless of which platform they consume their content from. In addition, we believe by improving the quality and consistency of audio playback on entertainment devices that primarily receive content via online and mobile distribution, our total addressable market is growing. We estimate that the market for handsets and tablets is over 1.4 billion units. We are working across the entire ecosystem, including content providers and distributors, technology platform providers and portable device makers to grow the adoption of our technologies. To date, mobile is our fastest growing market in percentage terms. Our technologies have now been incorporated into over 130 handset models, including 26 models with Dolby Digital Plus. In addition, our technologies are now in 23 tablet models. To date, we have made good progress with leading online providers of contents. In the area of content providers and distributors, Dolby's audio formats have been adopted by Netflix, VUDU, Amazon, Apple and CinemaNow. We have also been adopted by leading music services such as Rhapsody and Omnifone in order to provide a richer music experience. In the area of technology platform providers, we are working with IC suppliers to the mobile industry to support our technologies. To date, significant IC suppliers, including Texas Instruments, Analog Devices and Qualcomm have rolled out chips supporting our formats. Our technologies are also included in the DLNA standard and supported by user-generated formats such as DivX and AVCHD. Our inclusion in broadcast standards is also relevant in some portable devices. Finally turning to Cinema, we continue to work with the exhibitor community to support the transition to digital cinema and 3D. We offer a portfolio of audio and imaging technologies designed to bring the most immersive experience possible to the moviegoers. To date, we have shipped approximately 9,900 Dolby Digital Cinema systems and 8,300 Dolby 3D systems worldwide, giving us roughly 20% market share in each. In summary, we continue our commitment to raising the entertainment experience as consumers enjoy their favorite content anytime, anywhere. Whether in the cinema, in the home or on the go, Dolby provides audio solutions that ensure the best quality experience. We see significant opportunities ahead, as we continue to extend this experience across more service providers and devices ,and we will continue to introduce new audio and video solutions to improve the entertainment experience. And with that, I'll turn it over to questions.