The Betanews ground crew sum up CES 2009
It was a week with more than the usual chaos, but it left us all with a different perspective on the CE industry than we had going in. Angela, Jackie, and Tim share their thoughts on "green," on Pre, widgets, and 3-D football.
"Tomorrowland," that wonderfully boastful exhibit that was the hallmark of Disneyland since it first opened, let folks ride on a treadmill as animatronic scenes of our electronic, robotic, servo-motorized future dazzled them like Christmas displays in downtown retail store windows.
Sadly, Tomorrowland seems like yesterday.
I think my favorite moment on that front was listening to Stan Glasgow, [US president] of Sony, talk about how he felt watching the markets these past few months. He's talking about it being disorienting...and you know, he's scared.
Not that it's all that easy for a crew of three to cover one of the biggest industry conferences in America every year anyway, but this year, it seemed like there was dramatically more than the usual chaos.
On more than one occasion, our Jacqueline Emigh and Angela Gunn were personally escorted -- along with hundreds of others looking for the same events -- by CES personnel, to as many as four locations where they most clearly weren't. Maybe most poignantly of all, none of the locator maps on the show floor contained any markers pointing to "You Are Here."
But after the smoke cleared and you found your proper place on the planet Earth, what was the clearest and most prominent trend emerging from last week's conference?
SCOTT FULTON, BetaNews (Indianapolis): Did you get the feeling, seeing that, that you personally, over three years' time, would own in your living room a TV that would give you the opportunity to watch whatever you wanted to watch, whenever you wanted to watch it?
JE: Yea. I don't know if it'll be immediate, but I would say within the next year or two.
AG: There's sort of the ubiquitous supporting players of the show, the character actors you see in everything, and I think Yahoo Widgets certainly fit that bill. I kept hearing it, "Yahoo Widgets, Yahoo Widgets," and I guess it's like, "Oh, they're a widget company now." Hey, it's a living.
Then I thought it was interesting: Are we trying to push the river backwards getting people to take widgets when it doesn't sound like people maybe want widgets? We had that on [Betanews], and I'm going to be curious to see that unfold, because if that's an incorrect path, there are a lot of people on it, and it could be interesting to see how that plays out, whether the consumers just don't know they want it yet.
SF3: I thought while I was compiling that last widgets report: My wife and daughter are downstairs watching Miss Marple on PBS, and it occurred to me that these two people, as well versed as they are in technology -- and my daughter ever more so by the passing week -- would not in the least be interested in having a widget accompany this particular program. And I doubt very few millions would either. There is only going to be certain things that a person would need this handful of widgets for. When folks talk about an "immersive, interactive experience," they're already doing that! They're watching the show! It's as immersive as they want it to be at the time. Perhaps the widget would actually be an intrusion, detracting from immersion...How many times are you going to be watching "Gone With the Wind," and keeping track of stock quotes and the time?
JE: Well, from what I saw in the demo, you could click from the widgets into the full Web site. For example, you could have the weather for New York City running in the left-hand side of the screen at the bottom, or you could click from the weather [and open up the Web page] on the TV. [Whether this ends up being successful depends on whether more people watch PC on their TV than watch TV on their PC, which at least today seems to be consumers' preference.]
AG: I have a really bad feeling we are about to reboot Marshall McLuhan and find out, again, again, about lean-back vs.lean-forward technology. Every seven years or so, the industry forgets which end is up, and the newspaper must be applied across the snout until the dog sits down.
TC: The whole concept of having widgets available on the TV, for me, falls in line with the whole fiasco of "bonus content" on Blu-ray. There is not so much a need there, so there's this need that's being created which creates another mouth to feed. Companies are going to be coming out with stuff that has the ability to have something, but there's no content there to [pull it in]. Listening to people in the Leaders in Technology [panel] the other day, I really got the feeling that...it's not so much about convergence as it is about just having to wave in front of people to buy.
AG: Scott, I'd like to go on the record as being disturbed and confused by Tim's allegation that companies might exhibit artificially created needs at CES in Las Vegas. Can it be? I'm scared!
TC: The trend that I noticed that is very difficult to escape, and I hear a lot of people in the content business talking about it, is 3-D. I'm sick of hearing about this [stuff]. I don't want to hear about 3-D. It reminds me of what you always hear about the Great Depression, how spending at the movies went up. So many people are putting interest into this technology that, hey, maybe people will be interested in. "3-D, wahoo!"
The thing about it is, you have to produce something in 3-D from the start.
JE: That's what Sony was saying; they're the only ones who can.
TC: But that renders everything on a different plane. Maybe you have the best movie ever made, but you can't watch it in 3-D because it wasn't filmed in 3-D.
AG: And again, it's the whole interactive thing. Do I want to be forced to interact with the show by having to put these glasses on?
I went to see the BCS football game broadcast in the gi-normous 3-D at the Paris, and it looked cool except for the parts where it was a little wavy. There were parts where the motion was very fast, and I had to close one eye so I wasn't getting queasy. It's a damn sight better than I've ever seen it, and friends say the glasses are better looking than they've ever been. But I don't know if I want to have to work that hard at my television. I think it'd be great to have places to go -- going back to Tim's Great Depression thing -- to be able to see this on a regular basis. Football on a regular basis, I think, looks freakin' spectacular. But I don't want to see the newscast in 3-D. What, I'm gonna watch MSNBC? I don't need to see Olbermann in 3-D. I don't need to see Maddow in 3-D. No, no, no.
TC: I'm sure at some point, we're going to look back on this and [compare it to the onset of] color TV.
JE: It still seems artificial; stuff seems overly...3-D.
Next: Waiting for Steve Jobs...