January 12th, 2009 by argillander

Hello and welcome to my report on Consumer Electronics Show CES held in Las Vegas last week. As always, this is my subjective summary what I found interesting there!

Recession is here (but the next thing is upswing)

• CES regular attendees were wondering how empty it was at the show; there were 110.000 visitors (down 30.000 from the previous year) and 2.700 exhibitors (down 300)
• Consumer Electronic Association released some data on consumer electronics market: the global market in 2008 was up 13 % from the previous year; in 2009 the growth will slow down to 4,3 % and the market size will reach revenues of 724 billion $.
• In the US the market will decline this year by 0,6 %
• The good news: many good people are available for companies to hire in order to be fit when the upswing comes; people’s growing spare time will also give boost for social networking activities

TV sets to connect to the Internet, Yahoo presents TV interactivity

• Major TV manufacturers have launched at least pilot solutions where TV set is connected to broadband and Internet video content is almost seamlessly brought to TV screens (see also my IBC posting in September)
• Many TV vendors have partnered with video sites (YouTube, Amazon video, Netflix etc) and offer theri content through a television user interface
• Some solutions are shipping in the US, but I got no information when they would appear in Europe; partly a reason may be that the content partnerships are difficult to implement on European multi-country market
• Yahoo released an interesting widget platform, which allows to develop applications for TVs; widgets would be delivered over a broadband connection. Widgets and widget content is free while Yahoo places there some advertising. Yahoo pushes the widget platform to be standardised on some level. Many TV vendors were on the board, e.g. LG and Samsung. To me this concept made very much sense, could this be the route to make TV interactivity happen? (see also: connectedtv.yahoo.com)
• Ebay running on Yahoo widgets pictured below:

• 

3D comes to TV but it is still long way to go

• There is a growing interest towards 3D stereoscopic TV content and several TV vendors showcased their 3D solutions
• TV manufacturers are now looking for the next big thing after flat panel TVs and HD, 3D could be one (but the consumer interest needs to be awaked first: just 7 % of Americans have heard of the idea of bringing 3D to TV)
• 3D systems are widely being installed in movie theatres
• 3D requires usually special spectacles, but technologies that make eyeglasses redundant are coming
• Big film studios will launch 40 3D movie titles within next two or three years
• Content will be a bottleneck; ideally the same content could be used both for 2D and 3D viewing
• The boldest prediction was given by Fox’s President of Engineering, Andrew Setos: “HD quality autostereoscopic [no spectacles needed] will be here in two years”

OLED is the new, green TV display technology

• So-called organic LED (OLED) is the new display technology that brings many advantages compared with LCD: OLED need no backlighting making it energy-efficient and allowing really thin displays
• Several TV vendors showcased OLED TV sets (see Samsung’s OLED TV pictured below)

• 

• Sony unveiled a thin, flexible OLED panel that could be used for e-books

Netbooks continue to wake interest

• Several computer vendors unveiled new netbook – or small laptop – models, joining Asus and Acer, who have lead the netbook race so far
• Some of the netbooks are teared-down laptops for simple writing and browsing needs while are others fully-equipped computers
• For Internet service developers, netbook is a new form factor between mobile handsets and PCs – and a new screen size that needs to be supported

It’s their own mobile TV game in the USA

• As it has been known, Qualcomm’s subsidiary is running a mobile broadcast service based on MediaFLO technology. The service is provided for consumers by two major mobile operators, AT&T and Verizon. No information is available on the subscriber numbers (I tried to do some detective work but got no wiser).
• Now, US standards committee ATSC is the process of preparing their own new standard for transmitting existing TV channels with free-to-air business model, much in the way mobile TV works in Japan.
• There was a trial broadcast stream on air at CES and at least LG had several handsets on show that were receiving ATSC-based stream (see picture below; yes, there is an external antenna!)

US analog TV will be shut off in February… maybe…

• USA has decided to close down terrestrial analog TV transmissions in February, 17th
• During CES, Obama’s transition administration sources suggested that the switchoff date could be postponed, because many citizens are unprepared and government’s 40-dollar set-top-box subsidy coupons have run out. Regulator FCC’s chairman Kevin Martin however told CES attendees that they are committed to the decided date.
• 17 million US households depend on terrestrial transmissions
• Because US pay-TV market is already well developed, digital switchover is not believed to give a boost for TV subscriptions

Your comments are again more than welcome! (Don’t be discouraged by the somewhat clumsy reply process on this site!)

Tags: 3D TV, CES, digital media, electronics, internet tv, internet video, recession, USA

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 9:08 pm and is filed under CES. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.