dts to Switch Focus to Consumers

When dts released their quarterly earnings, they also announced a new focus - solely on their consumer market. They have sold both their Digital Cinema business (closed on May 9th for $3.3 million) and Digital Images (on April 4th for $7.5 million). dts could earn up to $11.7 million in "additional consideration" over the next few years based on the terms of the Digital Cinema sale but other than that it seems to be out of that sector. dts closed it's first quarter up 22% compared to 2007. CEO Jon Kirchner attributed the increase to growth in the HD optical markets - game consoles and stand-alone players being singled out.

What was most interesting about the announcement was that dts is continuing its mantra of "focusing on the consumer market." Apparently that means getting completely out of the traditional theater and focusing on home theaters. Now that the PS3 has dts MA internal decoding (easily making it one of the best Blu-ray players on the market), dts finally has viable inroads into the high def formats. While their dts MA format has been available since the beginning of the high definition format war, very few players (and those were usually the most expensive) could internally decode it. Recently, more and more receivers have hit the market with the ability to decode most of the high definition audio codecs, including the dts formats.

While dts is predicting (based on past years) a slow second quarter, it will be interesting to see how well their new strategy pans out. Most likely more information will be withheld until some of the larger consumer electronics shows like CEDIA and CES roll out later in the year. Stay tuned.