International Consumer Electronics Show 2007
I spent the first week of January in Las Vegas at the International Consumer Electronics Show 2007 browsing the booths along with 140,00 attendees from across the world. CES is considered as the world’s largest consumer technology tradeshow, and certainly it deserves its reputation. Most of the action happened in four venues, Las Vegas Convention Centre, Sands Expo and Convention Center, Las Vegas Hilton and the Venetian. Given the huge size of these venues like almost any building in Las Vegas, the distance between them and the traffic created by the immense flow of human crowd from one location to another, it was quite a marathon. Still, I managed to see the booths and exhibits of all the big boys, up and coming ones and even attended most of the keynotes.
At the consumer front, there was a lot of talk around the Full HD (aka 1080p) TVs, HDMI standards, Blue-ray Disc and HD-DVDs. Here in North America, Full HD TVs and HDMI are already commodities. All major retailers are increasingly pushing these products into our living rooms. In December and January, we needed them because it was Christmas and in February, it was the Super Bowl. Most of us, who are into watching TV, will eventually get one 1080p HDTV if not already have. The CES proved to me that the affordability is defined by the size of the screen, not by the technology anymore. Some consumers will pay for the larger screens as long as their living room and their wallet can accomodate. And the manufacturers will keep on delivering bigger sizes. For the Blue-ray and HD-DVD, many of us have been holding off since we did not know which technology would prevail. Not a mystery anymore, both technologies will do OK. LG introduced the combo Blu-ray and HD-DVD player, BH100 “Super Multi Blue Player” during the CES and even priced it around $1200 to be available in major retailers by the beginning of February. I am sure there will be more manufacturers to follow LG’s lead and eventually two formats will be treated as one, of course, other than their technological differences.
It was also visible to me in CES that Voice over IP (VOIP) telephony was getting more accessible and consumer friendly. VOIP based telephony service providers and VOIP related hardware manufacturers had claimed huge booth territory. There is a disruptive revolution happening on this front and it is just a matter of time until it becomes a commodity. Beware big telco, it won’t take long until each household with a broadband internet connection will have a plug and play configurable, half the price of standard phone VOIP service with a nice looking telephone set. There is a lot of money to be made for the enterpreneurs in this business at many levels.
Nokia and Microsoft were both heavily showcasing their location-based services through their GPS enabled telephones and software. GPS based products and services will continue to make our lifes easier while we are on the road by seamlessly integrating into our mobile phones, laptops and alike. Soon, like claiming the first spot in search engines, to claim the first spot among many competitors in a certain business line or on a building floor might depend on how much it is spent for bidding by the advertiser to these location-based service providers.
One of the busiest booths in CES was Sling Media. Sling Media sells the Slingbox, which beams programs from your TV to your laptop, cell phone or like, so letting you watch your TV while you are on the move. They have announced two new products. First one is Sling Catcher, which makes the Slingbox technology two-way, by letting web video to be viewed on your TV or your home TV to be viewed on your, say, hotel room TV. The second one was the Clip + Sling technology, which lets you to record clips from the shows you are watching and send them to a portal to share with your friends. Certainly, these are very interesting, very creative disruptive technologies and not only are changing the way we watch TV but also the concept of TV viewership.
The people at Sling Media are also working with CBS to build a Sling and CBS branded video destination site for Clip + Sling. Les Moonves, the CBS CEO, shed more light into the big picture as he sees it during his keynote address. Following the popularity of YouTube and myspace, the media companies seem to formulate the success equation on Web 2.0 with three main components; content, portal and community. Since content is their main line of business, they are heavily concentrating into building different portals and expecting the community to gather around these. They expect that as the community grows, through interaction, the content will get more aligned to community expectations, hence their customer base will also grow. He emphasized new partnerships of CBS with Sling Media and YouTube in his keynotes and supported the positive impact they make on CBS’s business with some neat examples. You might want to check “CSI Miami - Endless Caruso One Liners” on YouTube. Now wonder why Horatio Caine (David Caruso) makes much less cheesy one line statements in recent episodes of CSI Miami.
I agree that the content-portal-community approach is a good recipe for success and opportunities are not only limited to content providers but also portal providers and community opinion leaders. If you have an opinion and want to get heard, there has been a better time. With all this technology and buzz about mobility, connectivity, accessibility, community interaction which enables content enhancement, Web 2.0 sounds to me more and more like Renaissance 2.0.
It is always refreshing to see and hear new things, things that make you think deeper and thoroughly which normally you would not have time in your daily routine. For me, CES was not only a physical marathon but a mental one. And of course, a very rewarding one.
Written by Kaan Bora on February 11th, 2007 with
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