M+E Connections

Dolby Laboratories sees a “very good opportunity” for it in the mobile space, CFO Lewis Chew said at the B. Riley & Co. Investor Conference in Los Angeles May 25.

Use of the company’s Dolby Atmos audio technology in tablets, along with its relatively new Dolby Vision technology that improves the picture quality of TVs and Dolby Cinema technology that is designed for film theaters, should help drive the company’s growth over the next few years, he said.

“As the world has evolved, more and more people are consuming their video through other means than just on a TV or in a movie theater,” he said. There is definitely a “trend towards more adoption of higher-quality” audio technologies in mobile devices, he said.

Dolby’s audio technology is included in the latest Apple iOS update and that was a “great positive step,” he said, but added that was not its first win in the mobile space. After all, for a couple of years, its audio technology has been included in all high-end Amazon mobile devices, along with high-end mobile devices from Lenovo, HTC and Samsung, he said. Dolby’s technology significantly improves the audio quality in mobile devices, he said.

The company doesn’t believe that including its technology in mobile devices that, of course, can’t provide home theater- or theater-quality sound will dilute its brand name, he said. “The human user experience doesn’t try to compare that tablet to a theater; it’s comparing it to another tablet,” he said. Tablets without Dolby Atmos have much inferior audio quality and consumers can hear the difference when it’s demonstrated, he said.

Dolby Vision was introduced a little more than two years ago and “we see some real positive signs now” for its adoption, he said.

Vision has “moved even more quickly than we might have anticipated a year and a half ago,” he said. The technology is being included in TVs announced by several TV makers already, including LG and Vizio, he said. “Some are shipping now, but some will be shipping later this year,” he said. Three of Vizio’s five TV product families will feature Dolby Vision, while LG will feature the technology in all its 2016 OLED and Super UHD TVs, he said. But it “will be some time” before the technology is “fully penetrated” on the market. Dolby wasn’t expecting significant revenue from Vision this year, but “I think next year that could be a different story,” he said.