CES: the best gadget-fest I’ve never been to
Ahead of MediaTel’s CES Debrief in January, the event’s chair, Graham Lovelace, takes a look at what we might expect from the world’s largest consumer electronics fair – and what the implications might be for advertisers, agencies and media owners.
What do the following five consumer electronics items all have in common, apart from playing a part in revolutionising our media experiences and behaviours, and having an impact on the electronic entertainment industry?
– The video cassette recorder
– The compact disc player
– The DVD and Blu-ray disc
– HD television
– The personal (or digital) video recorder
The answer: each of these innovations was launched at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), an annual showcase of the new and shiny that first opened its doors in 1967. CES – it’s since added ‘International’ to its name – is billed as “the world’s largest annual innovation event”, attracting more than 153,000 attendees in 2013.
According to its owner and producer, the US Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the 2013 exhibition was the largest yet, with more than 3,250 firms unveiling 20,000 new gizmos and gadgets in a Las Vegas floor show equivalent in area to 37 American football pitches. Game on.
Attendees jet their way from more than 170 countries to attend International CES. The vast majority want to see (if not drool over) the hi-tech that’s likely to shape consumer electronics across 15 product categories – as well as ‘kick the tyres’ on the stands.
At this point I should declare that CES is the best gadget-fest I’ve never attended. It’s always clashed with something else, right at the start of a new year, so as a media consultant with a keen eye on new devices, new distribution, new viewing experiences and new monetisation opportunities, I’ve tried to cover the event from afar.
I’ll be doing that again, but also using MediaTel’s CES Debrief on January 21 to understand the implications for advertisers, agencies and media owners.
So what are our intrepid CES explorers likely to see among a bewildering array of techno wizardry that in the past has included self-driving cars, robots dancing Gangnam style, and 3D printing breakthroughs of the ‘whatever-next’ variety?
Well, for starters, there’ll be apps aplenty and enthusiastic talk of ‘second screens’ providing new monetisation opportunities as ads are served to smartphones and tablets based on what people are watching now on the main screen.
Second screens are morphing into remote controls and highly personalised TV guides – latest examples from start-ups as well as pay-TV giants will be on show. And the buzz around social TV – analysing what viewers are saying while they’re watching telly – will continue through CES and beyond as Twitter, which made much of its symbiotic relationship with TV in the run-up to its flotation, enters its first full year as a publicly traded company.
On the hardware side, higher resolution TVs will capture headlines. Ultra HD or UHD – I know, it sounds like new type of milk – is being launched in its 4K variant, four times sharper than current HD. All the major manufacturers will have latest 4K TVs (or displays, as the TV tech industry calls them) at CES; the question will be by how much these sets will have come down, making them more of a mass market proposition beyond the early adopter market.
Expect more jumbo OLED displays – better colours, higher contrast and super-thin screens, enabling curved TVs (improving the viewing angle and making the experience all the more ‘immersive’ and ‘engaging’ – we’ll hear those words a lot at the Debrief, I expect).
Curved screens have made their way to smartphones too, resulting in phones that are unbreakable and giving the product designers a chance to offer a device that once again looks like a phone (raise left hand, form fist, put thumb to ear, little finger to mouth – that shape).
Tablets will again be everywhere, with screens of varying shapes, sizes and resolutions. As well as wearable tech: connected glasses (‘eyewear’ is the fashionable term) and smart watches, the Swiss army knives of mobile media and communications. Never again will you wonder where you put your phone – you’ll be wearing it.
It all points to another year of high-speed innovation, with the potential for disruption never far away.
Media consultant Graham Lovelace will be chairing MediaTel’s CES Debrief on 21 January 2014.
Twitter: @glovelace