I'm back from the Consumer Electronics Show, the once-a-year showcase for the latest, most innovative consumer technology. With over 130,000 attendees, a show floor the size of six New York City blocks, and IMAX-sized arrays of flat-screen TVs everywhere, the CES can be hard to get your head around. But each year some strong themes emerge.
This year, a major development is what you could call the Emerging Entertainment Ecosystem. We're moving rapidly into a world where movies, live TV, music, and more will be available on all devices, anywhere and at any time.
The idea of "TV everywhere" has been around for a while. For instance, Slingbox began six years ago by marketing devices that send your TV signal to your smartphone or laptop, wherever you are. At the Slingbox booth, a rep told me how he'd recently used their product to watch his local TV station via Wi Fi on a plane over the Middle East. What's different now is that major manufacturers, software companies, and carriers are partnering to develop fully integrated systems to provide entertainment across devices.
The Consumer Electronics Association, which puts on CES, chose several keynoters to talk about their visions for integrated entertainment. Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg described how his company is developing strategies, infrastructure, and devices that will allow you to view TV or movies in HD with higher download and streaming speeds on your smartphone or tablet. The new XOOM tablet, designed in a partnership between Motorola, Google, and Verizon, is made for this use, and was a popular stop on the CES show floor. The XOOM, expected out early this year on Verizon's 3G network, will use a new version of Google's Android platform, called Honeycomb, that's developed specifically for tablet use and will be upgradeable to Verizon's new high-speed LTE network by mid-year.
In a similar vein, keynoter Boo-Keun ("BK") Yoon, President and General Manager of Samsung's Visual Display Business, presented a vision for integrated entertainment from a product manufacturer's point of view. The world's leading manufacturer of 3D televisions, Samsung produces everything from smart TVs, which are large Internet-enabled home units, to smartphones and Galaxy tablets. In partnership with Comcast, Hulu, and others, Samsung is "breaking down the wall between devices." As Yoon demonstrated, you'll be able to start watching a movie on your tablet, pause, and resume from the same place on your TV; watch the same live TV on your tablet as in your living room; and use your Galaxy to run your DVR, search for programming, and control your home TV set without using a conventional remote.
Many other major exhibitors on the show floor had demos of their own versions of integrated entertainment. The technology relies on broadband, with programming stored and managed through the Internet cloud and accessible by all kinds of devices. As this new entertainment ecosystem becomes the industry standard, we'll need to develop faster speeds and greater capacity for both fixed and wireless networks. The Consumer Electronics Association estimates that 70 percent of all consumer electronic devices will be connected to the Internet by 2014. With half of all Internet traffic now used for video, and more video use to come, the demands on our infrastructure will ratchet up by the year. The National Broadband Plan makes several recommendations for managing the new demand, and the FCC's spectrum policy has made the expansion of wireless broadband a priority.
The ultimate goal of all this new technology is a better experience and more opportunities for consumers. Please add a comment to share your thoughts and experiences on TV, the Web, and the entertainment experience you'd like to have in the future.