Bigger is better

There was an elephant in the room when Toshihiro Sakamoto, president of Panasonic, delivered the keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas — and not in the figurative sense, either. The global electronics giant unveiled a 150-inch flat-screen plasma TV prototype dubbed the Life Screen.

The monitor came in at 11 by 7 feet, or the size of nine 50-inch TVs stacked up, earning it the designation of world's largest flat-screen TV and the undisputed “awe-factor” award for this year's CES. To just get the set into the Las Vegas Convention Center, the TV had to be shipped in a storage container in the nose of a 747 — actually, the only way to deliver it, Sakamoto said.

The prototype featured 2160- by 4096-pixel resolution — four times the resolution of the 1080p full high-definition (HD) specification, which means the set may be able to handle better resolutions that could come in the future, the company said. For service providers, it means they better ramp up their bandwidth capacity to keep up with an innovation this size.

Yoav Schreiber, senior analyst for Current Analysis, said that whether telcos can support this level of HD resolution is purely a bandwidth issue. To accommodate four-times 1080p, operators would have to up their broadband access, which many already have in the works.

“The overall capacity of telcos is there to be able to deliver the entire triple or quadruple play,” Schreiber said. “Basically, they have the bandwidth and they have the capability, they just need to make the investment in laying fiber, most likely. I don't think you'll hear this so much from the cable operators. There is a sense that cable operators will need to make further investment to be able to manage the delivery of greater amounts of content or greater amounts of high-definition.”

While cable operators could make this significant investment, they have yet to say if they will, Schreiber said. Satellite operators, however, may be another story.

“There are not that many people who have such large spaces for such TVs, and they usually are in larger houses in areas where they are more likely to be getting reception by either the highest end of fiber optic cable from a telco like Verizon FiOS or maybe even satellite,” Schreiber said. “I think you will see satellite being able to offer it because they are the ones able to deliver the signal.”

Sakamoto said the behemoth was designed especially for digital cinema and commercial installations, but might also be found in some “very luxurious special homes in the future.”

Back in 2006, Panasonic unveiled a 103-inch plasma TV, the year's biggest. More than 3000 were sold last year at $70,000 each, a figure high enough to amaze Sakamoto himself. No pricing has been released for the 150-inch screen, but reports have put it in the $100,000 range.