Dolby teams with China to tap mobile industry

China's innovation and market size have helped Dolby Laboratories pioneer its latest entertainment technologies in the mobile industry.

"China is really important for Dolby. Of course, the market is big, there are big OEMs (original equipment manufacturers). But the real reason to me is China is innovating in many forms in terms of mobile business," said Taeho Oh, vice-president of Dolby's mobile business, on Monday.

Oh, who manages the global business and travels to China frequently, said China had become a leader in new trends and technologies.

"We have evidence from our perspective," he said. "Lenovo launched the first Atmos smartphone, and iQIYI (an online video platform in Beijing) launched the first Atmos mobile content in the world."The name Atmos refers to Dolby's latest sound technology, which places and moves audio around, even overhead.

Lenovo is the first company to launch a smartphone enabled with Dolby Atmos last year. So far, Lenovo has launched more than 30 products that adopted Dolby Audio technologies, including PCs, tablets, phablets and smartphones.

Consumers can experience the exact cinema sound from their mobile devices with regular headphones, said Oh, adding that more new devices are expected to come with Atmos support in the future, Oh said.

According to the latest teaser of an upcoming smartphone posted by Lenovo India's Twitter account last month, the new device featuring dual speakers is designed to "deliver rich and powerful sound thanks to Dolby Atmos".

Statistics show that about two-thirds of smartphone-users watch videos on their phones, and about two-thirds of the time that "millennials" spend watching video is on mobile devices.

"They not only watch short clips, but also serious, quality movies and TV series on their mobile devices," said Oh, who said they have been tracking the trend and the amount of time the users spend on consuming mobile entertainment content.

"High-quality content is all about quality, and there's a lot of demand on mobile content," he said. "Their demand for higher quality goes up more than 10 percent year-on-year."

However, while the demand for higher-quality content goes up, the mobile devices tend to be smaller and thinner, making the environment worse for the audio experience.

The gap between demand and supply is getting wider, and that's where Dolby can shine by collaborating with China, according to Oh.

iQIYI, currently the largest online video site in China, is the first online content provider in the world to produce and deliver TV dramas in Dolby Surround Sound.

The Legend of Zu, a Chinese fantasy drama created with Atmos technology, was released on iQIYI to VIP subscribers in September 2015.

Brought from cinema to home and now to mobile devices, China moves rapidly in content creation, otherwise The Legend of Zu wouldn't be possible, Oh said.

The majority of Chinese premium-content providers, such as Letv, PPTV and China Mobile, all have offered content services enabled with Dolby technologies, which are ahead of their counterparts in other countries, he added.

Instead of building products and bringing them to China, Dolby aims to build a partnership with Chinese companies and engineers in China to interact with China-based customers because "innovation happens there", Oh said.

"When we have a new innovation idea, we show them (Chinese partners) first before we productize it. With the feedback, we actually build it together and go to market for years," he said.

liazhu@chinadailyusa.com

(China Daily USA 03/30/2016 page1)