Interview with Portrait Displays VP of Marketing Marcel Gonska on Digital Display Oppportunities in Retail

Speaker A: Welcome to the retail tech podcast. This is Darius Basafi. And today I'm excited to speak with Marcel, uh, Gonska, VP of marketing at the company called Portrait Displays. Hey, Marcel.

Speaker B: Hey, Darius. Thanks for having me. I'm super.

Speaker A: Thank you for joining me on the show. Um, let's start with a brief background on yourself and the portrait. Yes, sure.

Speaker B: Um, wow, that's always, like, where to start? Um, my name is Marcel Gonzka. Um, I work with portrait displays for 10 years now. I think even a little bit longer. Um, myself, I'm in the video business for about 27 years now. Almost 30 years. I actually stopped counting, I think. Um, and, uh, Portrait Displays is a software company. We are located in, um, uh, Northern California and the Bay Area, close to San Francisco. And, uh, we do everything. Software, uh, for displays. So it's about color correction, color control, display control. Everything you can imagine that either is a TV or a monitor and everything that kind of shows a picture.

Speaker A: Okay, great. So we've, uh, talked about what calibration, which is like a key point about the process is, and I, uh, would love to get, like, an education from you, uh, like a quick course, uh, on what calibration is.

Speaker B: Wow, okay, that's cool. Um, let's, let's start with some very simple facts, I think, to get your audience into the mood. What actually we're talking about here today, um, everyone most likely owns a television. I would say so, um, or a second screen. And they're consuming whatever their favorite show, their favorite games, uh, their favorite movies. The question that normally would come up if I would ask you, do you know if you really see what the intention was of the artist that created that content? In other words, do you see Star wars as it was intended by George Lucas, or did you. Or do you see Avatar as it was intended by James Cameron? I think at that point a lot of customers would say, well, I don't know.

Speaker A: Right. I hope so, but I'm not sure. Right, right.

Speaker B: I hope so. And I think this is exactly the question. And then I, uh, can give you an immediate answer. I would say 99% of the people that get the TV out of the box are not seeing it the way it is actually meant to be seen. So that's basically the downside of the whole television business is that in this industry, a lot of TVs are cranked up to 11 just to scream at the people at the show floor. For example, um, gaining attention because there's a lot of competition in the market, which is not A bad thing necessarily. Um, but there's I think, a very big difference between watching something at home versus going through any market, uh, or your favorite, ah, hi, ah, fi, high end home theater store, and then looking at a tv because it's a totally different environment to begin with. And um, the other thing is that most, or normally every content, all the content that's created somewhere in Hollywood, or be it broadcasted content, everything that's professionally produced is produced according to specific video standards, which are international video standards. And so it's not a guesswork actually when an artist makes artistic, um, decision on the content. So when you watch a movie like Matrix, for example, um, color is a very important tool for storytelling. So every scene that plays in the Matrix has kind of a light greenish tint so the audience can actually follow. So the idea of the Wakowski siblings was like, um, guiding the audience through a complex story and making color an important piece of, uh, storytelling. Uh, now if you have a wrong setting on your tv, you probably don't even see the correct green. You don't even see the colors in a way that were meant to be seen. It's maybe even too bright in a dark room. It's fatiguing, you know. Or, um, you're in a bright room and it's too dark and too dim and you don't see anything. Like there was this favorite episode called, um, uh, the Long Night, um, with uh, what was that show, um, Game of Thrones where a lot of media outlets were reporting that people were complaining they didn't see enough. It was like it was dark. How could that be? Right, so that is a long answer to your question. That's why calibration actually can be a very powerful tool to maintain and preserve creative intent.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: But it can also be an excellent tool for retailers to add value to their business.

Speaker A: Yeah, so as, as a consumer that, you know, which has uh, uh, you know, two actually TVs in, in my home. And I was kind of like surprised when I heard from you about this point. And I, I always thought that, okay, like digital TVs, they're going to be set up properly when I receive them. And uh, I, you know, I mean, again, I was just uneducated and uninformed about the technology of it. And the technology is a lot more complicated than what we know as consumers. So now when you go to an AV specialist store to buy your tv, I'm sure they know better and they actually will calibrate your TV when they do the installation. Assuming I'm Making an assumption. Um, but when you buy it from regular like retailers, uh, that's the, that's the question. And then you know, I mean we're spending decent money on these uh, TVs. And if we're not getting the, the best picture, it's uh, it's a loss. It's uh, it's unfortunate. So that's why I thought it was really interesting and uh, important to actually open this up for everybody else. Now maybe I'm the only person that didn't know this, but I doubt it.

Speaker B: No, you're absolutely right. And if the audience might ask, oh, why would you care? Right. Um, so pottery displays, to give another part of the answer, who we are is, um, we started 30 years ago in display and color control, specifically in display control. So when they were all big bulky CRT monitors, if I show those to my kids, they think it's a refrigerator or a microwave oven or something. They would never think that those were monitors and TVs. But um, the idea was that you had a monitor that you could pivot from a portrait, uh, from a landscape format into a portrait format. That's why our company is still called Portrait Displays. So that's where our name actually came from. And we then actually, over the 30 plus years we are now on the market, um, we designed software for Windows because um, Mac, Apple had always a very well maintained ecosystem when it came to color control of their products. Windows on the other hand was actually all over the place because it was a tool, an operating system that was utilized by a lot of different independent manufacturers. And so you had then on top of that a lot of uh, different independent brands of monitors that there was always a need of a better control of the color. What you're looking at specifically in the creative domain in the beginning, um, today media consumption for consumers is also equally important. Um, and that's actually where we started. And then about 15 years ago we actually came up with um, we acquired a company that has a software which is called Calman. And Calman is a display, uh, calibration tool. It's a display calibration software you're installing on a notebook, you know, and then you can use that software to professionally calibrate TVs, displays, monitors, um, almost everything, even tablets these days, um, can be professionally calibrated. Even an iPad Pro if you want to do this, which a lot of professionals do in the production. And so Calman became very quickly the leading solution, specifically in Hollywood. So all the studios are using Calman specifically, um, on their Onset monitor calibration. Um, a video village where the director sits and where, um, the DIT is. That's the digital image technician who is wrangling all the data. Um, then specifically in post production, where you have, where the entire color correction of the movie normally happens and the color grading, which is an artistic process that is a very important one that actually defines how the content looks in the end. And so they trust, um, only what they have calibrated. And so this tool became the tool, um, in the overall media creation industry across the world. And then we actually moved on to a point that we said, well, there needs to be a lens to living room experience, because it does. There's always that need of the artist that his or her work will be seen the way it was meant to be seen. So there was always a concern on the creational side. That's what George Lucas came up with the THX sound system, like in the 80s, because the, the cinemas were all sounding differently. You walked into one movie theater and the volume was cranked up and then it was too loud. And then the other movie theater, it was too low and the audio was not right at all. And then on the third one, the projector, the lamp and the projector was basically dying and the picture was way too dim. So they came up actually with this kind of idea, how can we maintain the quality? And so we actually brought it to the next level where we said, well, the big retail space is where you would want to democratize picture quality to get it to the next level. Because as you said, of course there are home theater stores, professionals that know about it, but we talk about a tiny homeopathic percentage of people who would actually buy from there. But if you walk into a Costco or another place where you just pick your TV and you go home, the question is, are they going to see this? And the answer is most likely no. Because even if the TV has a picture mode that is close to what it is to be like, a filmmaker mode, for example, is a good example. A lot of TVs have what they call the filmmaker mode these days. Um, but you always have this factory process. It's never. There are always deviations in the panels. There's always different settings that are maybe not still ideal. And then there's even a, a dark room, maybe a theater. And, um, there's a bright room where you put up your tv. So a lot of different things that could make it even better. And so we thought, why don't we create something that retailers could quickly use Learn scale within even a big organization, improving quality of service but also adding value for their customers and becoming part of the lens to living room experience and even making profit with that. That's not a bad thing. Right? So that was the idea.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so um, the, there's two points here. One is on the consumer side. I, okay, so now I wasn't aware of this, something that I should have thought about or known about. Now I know about it. Where do I get it? How do I get it? How does, how do I apply it to my default, the TVs that I have now or even think about like the new ones that I'm maybe buying. And then on the how and where side is the, the retailer side or the service provider side? Um, and let, let's talk about that side of it.

Speaker B: Good. Um, yeah, let me, let me start with um, the um, the retail side. Um, if you want to get ah, a TV calibrated there, there are different ways of actually doing it. I mean if you do it yourself, person that what we call our DIYers, right? We have even consumer versions of our software, which is called Kelman Home, for example, that lets the people who really like to do everything on their own, the home builders, you know, and the Home Depot people, you know, and the guys who are interested in tech, they could do it. Um, a very important element here is that most of the big TV brands that we work with, Sony, Samsung, lg, Panasonic, Philips, tcl, Hisense, the big seven as we call them, they all have at least their premium models. They have uh, an interface so they can talk to our software. So that means that the whole process is almost easily optimized so that even a person could learn it and doesn't necessarily have to go to a color science class or something, right? Or be someone who is you years in this, in this industry. Um, but be honest. I mean being honest for us means yeah, there are those customers out there and we, we love them. But that's not the scale. The scale is of people like you walking into a store buying a tv. Now you would rely on someone else doing it and um, who are those people? And so um, we started a um, business model for retail chains back in 2017, 2018 in Europe. We started this all um, on purpose in Europe because the European landscape was always like pretty service oriented. And as you know, it's always a big deal to find a way that you can compete with E commerce or something, specifically in the brick or mortar, uh, environment where you want to add Value because, um, well, customers are, come to your place, they actually look. And you don't want to compete over price necessarily all the time. So service became a very important product. And you see that also here in the United States, service is always added. It's a TV mounting, it's TV delivery, it's a TV setup even, you know, and then it's probably also a warranty extension and maybe, uh, even an additional insurance if something happens to the tv. So the reason why those, those, those things exist is because margins of TV sales are decreasing. How can retail chains maintain or regain some of that profit? How can you actually get back into this? And so this is a thing that was in Europe also always omnipresent. And so, um, we started to look into how can we help those to provide another service, which is what we call calibration as a service, or cas, caas, which is kind of derived from software as a service. Because we provide the software. We are technology enabler. We don't do the calibration. We, we train their teams. Normally it's like a train the trainer thing because they have their own trainer teams that are training the salespeople on the floor. So, you know, when you have a big chain like Media Market in Europe, they have thousands, thousands of staff members. We cannot do all those trainings for everyone. So we train normally a group of specialists and they scale within their organization and then we provide all the technology. And so this is how it actually started about seven, eight years ago. And today, fast forward, we talk about 30 retail chains and we talk about hundreds and thousands of calibrations that are actually performed in a very high quality across the central European landscape. We have also in Canada, a few partners. And where could you see it in the U.S. well, nowhere at this point. And this is basically why I think you and I, we started talking because we said, oh, that's actually interesting because, um, it's a proven track record and a very successful business model that actually works in different ways. It can be adjusted to what the needs are, but there's always value add to, um, a TV sale to a hot resale. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Okay. So, uh, the goal is to hopefully we can get this, uh, product available to people in the U.S. and um, now in, in the U.S. uh, something that's very common is that, you know, companies outsource specific features to subcontractors. So is that also a possibility that you would have a company that actually does this as a specialty and then subcontracts with retailers to provide this offer? This as an add on.

Speaker B: That's a great question, Darius. That's exactly what we do. Depending on the retail chain. Um, I can give you a couple of examples. Uh, maybe the question is how and where is the calibration performed? This is maybe the very first question. Um, so normally there are three typical business types. The, the first one that very big organizations do is what we call warehouse calibration. It happens already in the warehouse or it happens already in a distribution center. Where for example, a store chain doesn't necessarily have the space or the ability to perform the calibrations in every single store. So what they do is they create a SKU for a, uh, calibration that was applied to a specific TV model and then they sell that as including a calibration and then as the whole thing is basically already shipped ready to be picked up and taken home, um, to the stores that are then actually just doing the promotion and the sales part of it. So where the sales team is being trained and normally those sales teams just got a sales training from us. We basically have two different types of trainings. We have one that's more like the technical related one to get a technician team going. But then there's another one where we really focus on the unique selling propositions that they are successfully selling that as an add on service. The second way that most of the stores in Europe do is they actually calibrate in the store. It's very interesting. So every single store is performing calibrations.

Speaker A: Do they charge more for that or

Speaker B: it's absolutely, uh, well normally they do. Normally they do. So I think the average sales price for a calibration is about 99 Euros.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: Kind of, you know, like 100 something dollars.

Speaker A: And it doesn't matter what size the TV is.

Speaker B: It doesn't matter what size the TV Is. Absolutely. It's totally independent from the TV size. Um, and the beautiful thing is because we provide this kind of auto calibration with all those big TV brands, it's very easy to learn for a team. And the other beautiful thing is it's very, very professional calibration. So in 10, 15 years ago, the reason why no, uh, big retail chain was touching this topic is because it was way too complex to cost incentive. It's like cost extensive. It's like, it doesn't, just doesn't make sense. And now it's an uh, almost automized process that is easy as 1, 2, 3 to click a couple of buttons and connect the TV. And the whole calibration is performed in Just one process. So for example, when we do auto calibration with LG TVs, we do all the picture modes, all of them. There is a day mode for bright room, a day mode for a dark room, for night mode for a dark room. There's an HDR 10 mode for HDR that is HDR content. There's a Dolby Vision calibration for Dolby Vision content. And then uh, there's even game mode calibrations. So it's more like the limitation is not what we can do. It's almost like how much access does a TV brand give us in our partnership with the TV brand to control the scaler, which is the video processor, and then basically color correcting this and storing that on the memory. And the consumer doesn't even have to choose anything. It's like in a dark room they use the night mode. In a bright room they do the day mode. And then HDR comes automatically. The TV switches automatically to Dolby Vision mode or to HDR mode. So it's really simple and almost, I would say, foolproof for the people who do the calibration. And so they start to do this, they get the TV out of the box, they run all the calibration, then they add a calibration report to it that goes back into the box, that's adding the value that this TV really is calibrated as close as possible. Now here comes the very important story to what the display would look the director or the artist was using to make the artistic decisions, right? Because it's the same standards.

Speaker A: So how do you like for different movies? Let's say, how does the person that's doing the calibration know what the director wanted?

Speaker B: That's a great question. Well, it is because the standards are always the same. So when, when they, when they have a monitor in the post production, let's say in, in what you call a color grading bay, that's where the color correction is done by a person who has a job. It's called the colorist. It's a real job. And this colorist is doing the final color of that movie. Everything this colorist is doing is on a calibrated professional reference display. So of course this is a 30,000, $40,000 24 inch, 32 inch reference monitor. This is basically a measurement device. And it's like a canvas, um, on which the colorist can paint the colors. But uh, what the colorist can do with this specific display already has its own constraints. It's basically the display itself. And this Constraint is defined by a standard. So we have a color standard that's called P3. That's the same color that's being used by digital cinema projectors. When you walk into a big movie studio, right. That has its own standards called P3 color. When you watch, um, a movie that is HD only, not 4K or HDR, but HD only, then this has its own color standard. It's called HD 709 or BT 709. That's the name of the standard. Very, very cryptic, but the idea is this monitor that is being used is either Running in a HD mode or running in a P3 mode, or running in any mode. But it's based on the standard. And in the calibration for the home tv we do exactly the same, we calibrate it to exactly the same standard. So it doesn't matter what you watch, it always looks correct. That's the idea.

Speaker A: So that's the. So you said there were three different ways to provide, uh, the calibration. One is in the warehouse.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: The other one is in the home.

Speaker B: In the store. The store.

Speaker A: In the store. Okay. Yes.

Speaker B: They take the TVs out, do the calibration, put it back in the box and say, now this TV is calibrated and um, sell it. Then as the add on. The third one was what you just mentioned, the third one would be actually in the home. So they really provided a, an in home calibration service, which is quite frankly also a nice way to do it. Um, gives this whole thing maybe a little kind of a more personal touch.

Speaker A: Probably the best, the closest to the real experience of the viewer in their home. No, you're, you're.

Speaker B: I think you're right, but there is this specific thing where um, let's say in hdr, for example, the TV has its own limitation, how bright it can get in hdr. And that is totally independent on what the room is or what the room requirements are. So what we do normally is when we do the, what we call pre calibration before the TV leaves the store, um, we have a day mode calibrated that it's looking as good as it can be in a bright room. And the night mode calibration is normally calibrated to our dark room. And we know pretty much exactly based on 25 plus years of experience, both in the film industry as well as in the display industry, what those, those luminance levels actually should be. These are normally the typical differences and how, how you maintain also information, visible information in very dark parts. Of the picture. So you have to make in a bright room, you have to make the dark things a little brighter. Not to get too technical, but it's called the gamma. The gamma has to be a little different so it comes out of black a little faster so that the whole thing like the long night with, you know, Game of Thrones does not happen. Um, but as soon as you're sitting in a dark room, then you want to do exactly what the colorist was seeing in his studio. Because you're in a controlled environment, you can get the best quality you want. So it's really, we know how to do this, so you don't need to do this in the home. Long story.

Speaker A: I actually remember, I think that episode of the Game of Thrones where I was also saying, like, why is I can't see anything?

Speaker B: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's actually sad.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: And then, and then all this discussion went on like, oh man, you know, the movie industry should finally act actually, uh, match their, their things more to, um, to what the consumers homes are. And I think that's exactly the wrong

Speaker A: thing because bring down their standards to the level of the home.

Speaker B: Yes. Why would you want to do this? I think it's the other way around. How can you make something that's perfectly made work well and beautifully also? That's what technology should be there for without destroying the artistic intent. And that's basically what we do. You know, There's Dolby Vision 2 now coming out.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: CS was a big buzz about Dolby Vision, uh, the next level, uh, and the next standard from Dolby. Uh, and you might ask, well, isn't that Dolby Vision enough? You know, number one, Dolby Vision is its own ecosystem. So it's setting, it's basically maintaining the artistic intent, but it still is shown on the display. And so if that display is not calibrated properly, then the Dolby Vision doesn't even also look as good as it actually could look.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: So we are pretty much not really competitors with Dolby in this case if someone would wonder like here in this audience. No. Um, we're basically, um, supporting each other because when we calibrate a display that can show Dolby Vision, this Dolby Vision looks even better and is even more closer to what the artist was seeing when they were putting the content together.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I just, I mean, the more I think about it, I think it's just like, uh, it's an easy, uh, decision. You're spending a decent amount of money now these days. Now, uh, TVs are coming down in price, but still. And then, you know, you're spending so much time in front of these devices, why wouldn't you want to invest a little bit more and get a much better experience? And I think most of the people that I know at least would definitely say, oh, you know, this is like a no brainer, let's do it.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Where do I get it?

Speaker B: For the retailers, we actually, I mean there's, there's two things and you're absolutely right, that should be the case. I was, I went into Costco, um, a few days ago and they had this 100 inch Hisense mini RGB, mini LED, not RGB but mini LED TV for 14.99.

Speaker A: Unbelievable.

Speaker B: So, yeah, yeah, right.

Speaker A: This is.

Speaker B: I almost, I almost, I m. Fell backwards. I thought this can't be real. So I had to look twice on the sign and it was actually saying 14.99. I said, wow, this is real home theater at home. Now imagine you take this, this thing home and um, if you have an elevator, you have to find a way how to get it, you know, upstairs.

Speaker A: You need at least two people. You definitely cannot do it by yourself.

Speaker B: That's right. Um, but just imagine now you have this big, awesome big screen that also has a lot of calibration capabilities by the way. Some of them are even coming ready.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Um, that's what the program is. So it talks to our software. It can be easily calibrated. Now you take it out of the box. It's running in a standard mode, most likely, or in echo mode, which means the white point is wrong. The picture is too blue, it's too bright and you're sitting in front of a 100 inch TV like 2 meters away or I don't know, like, I don't know how many feet and the picture is screaming at you and you don't even see what the hard work and the beautiful work that went into, actually into, I don't know, like Stranger Things or something. So this is really kind of a thing. Like there needs to be this additional level of control. So this is basically what, what those retailers do. They even set in the right picture modes. Even when it comes out of the box it looks better. And if they can calibrate it, they do make it even another level better. So it's different tiers of getting it to a level that you say this is exactly, actually like that cinema, that's really no cinema. And I see it the way it is. Um, and it's, it's very Compelling. It's very compelling.

Speaker A: It is. Um, so this is fascinating and I am super excited that I met you and I'm learning more about it and definitely will uh, uh, help any way I can to get this out to the people and even for myself. But before we, we finish up, uh, what do you think I uh, is like what are the new things that are going to come out in TV technology or things that we, we haven't even heard about as consumers?

Speaker B: Well, I mean, well there's always, there's always development of course, and at CS show this time, I mean everything is rgb, mini, led, um, and um, specific one also Quantum dot oled. There's QD oled. There are very specific display technologies that get more color information across which get much closer to um, what the most difficult standards are, the standards normally that are out there. The biggest standards that are made are provided by laser projection. For example, in a big movie theater. If you go in a movie theater, you normally want to watch a movie in Dolby Cinema for example, or in IMAX laser, um, or Barco, um, Barco laser, there's Barco, um, laser projection, those kind of things are meeting the highest standards that you can find. And that means that those movies are mastered actually to exactly those display technologies. What you will see in the very near future is that even home televisions will get much closer to exactly this. So the, the experience from the top level of cinema, most expensive production value will be even getting more closer to what you can experience in the home. And that is I think a beautiful thing by itself. The difference what you, why you would want to still go to the movie theater is because you have a much bigger screen, uh, or you can have much better, better audio you could never do, you know, or because also having something with your peers, with the friends, sitting in a movie theater and enjoying something together for two, three hours. Right? So that is basically the reason why you will go to the movie theaters. But the technology itself, you will see there's a merger between all those technologies getting to this one point that maybe in the future there's only one master and it's going to be distributed all across from the cinema down to the, the to, to the TV at home. Right? Maybe the most important thing is I think that we with our software, with the Kalman software, we always, because we work on both ends on the production side as well as on the media consumption side. We have our software always up to date that any standard is supported by the software. And what we also do is um, If a retail chain or a retail group wants to try what we just talked about today, we provide an opportunity for a pilot project which actually gives them a head start so that they can try it. We provide the hardware, software, they can try how it actually is, um, hitting the market. And if they see it works, then we actually talk about a larger rollout in a specific region. So there's a lot of experience with us and 10 years in Europe that we now want to bring to the United States. And we believe that it can be pretty much evenly successful, for sure.

Speaker A: Fantastic. Well, it's been, uh, wonderful to speak with you and learn about, uh, the uh, portrait displays and the uh, calibration technology. And uh, look forward to seeing this available in stores all over the U.S.

Speaker B: yeah, just check out this, what you see here in the back. This picture is from Norway. That is, they have in the store they show a, uh, non calibrated one. This one here, bright and beautiful.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And then the other one here, that's the calibrated. So the brightness is the same, the luminance is the same. But this is the, what we call the portrait family because.

Speaker A: Right. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: And you see they really look natural and good and clean. This is what they show in those stores. And the consumers walk by and say, hey, wait a minute, I miss something if I don't have the best settings. Right. That's a typical setup. So just if someone was wondering what this means. So the selling issue is as important as a good calibration. So to explain and educate the consumers. Right. Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. It's been great speaking with you.

Speaker B: Thank you so much, Darius. Let's stay in touch.

Speaker A: Yes, thanks.