January 17, 2011
Volume XXXIII, Issue 9
CES 2011 Was Likely Largest Show in Three Years
Excerpted from PCWorld Report by Martyn Williams
This year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) attracted around 140,000 people, easily surpassing pre-show estimates and beating the two prior events, the event's organizers said late Sunday.
Organizers estimated that around 126,000 people would turn up for the four-day long gadget fest, which would have been in-line with 2010's attendance of 126,641 people and well above 2009's 113,085 people.
At around 140,000, attendance is closer to 2008's pre-economic crisis level of 141,150 people. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) typically releases audited attendance figures in May.
The CEA's announcement likely wasn't a surprise for anyone that attended the event in Las Vegas, NV. Attendees faced long lines for taxis and the city's monorail throughout the convention, which was a preliminary sign that attendance had rebounded.
Organizers also announced a schedule change to the CES schedule for 2012, running the show from Tuesday through Friday from January 10th to 13th.
The change might help keep attendees in town for the third and fourth days of the show. Many typically leave on Friday or Saturday, which means the show floor is mostly vacant on Sunday.
This CEA attempted to boost crowds and raise money this year by offering individuals the chance to attend the show on Sunday if they became a "CEA Tech Enthusiast" member for $49.
Check out our complete coverage of CES 2011.
CES: Programming Alliances Played Bigger Role
Excerpted from Broadcasting & Cable Report by George Winslow
Business alliances were as important as new technologies at last week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, NV, as consumer electronics (CE) manufacturers worked to differentiate their products by cutting deals with programmers and multichannel operators.
Samsung announced alliances with both Comcast and Time Warner that will allow cable subscribers later this year to use all the applications on Samsung's new smart TVs, including the Internet content. The agreement will also allow subscribers to more easily search for TV programs and movies, and to watch TV programming on Samsung's Galaxy Tab.
Meanwhile, Sony announced a deal with Time Warner Cable that would allow subscribers to access all of the smart TV's features and the MSO's live programming without a set-top box (STB).
Echostar's Sling Media also cut a deal with Verizon so that users with Sling-based equipment can access content from Dish over Verizon's new 4G network if they are willing to pay a subscription fee to Verizon.
Such alliances are likely to become even more important over the next year, as CE manufacturers roll out more Smart TVs and tablets with Internet connections. Shortly before the show, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) estimated that over 80 tablets would be shown at the show and that worldwide tablet sales would hit about 30 million in 2011.
Overall, the CEA is projecting that global retail sales of CE will increase by 10% to $964 billion in 2011 from $873 billion in 2010. In the US, factory sales to retailers should hit in $182 billion, up from $175 billion in 2010.
The proliferation of new devices and new ways of accessing content prompted a number of comments at sessions about the prospect that a growing number of consumers would use these devices to discontinue their cable subscriptions and threat these devices posed to traditional TV and multichannel players.
But the high profile announcements between CE manufacturers and multichannel providers seemed to indicate that multichannel providers were embracing over-the-top content and that the new smart TVs and tablets would be used to enhance the existing multichannel experience with online content, much-improved search functions, interactivity and the ability to access more content on mobile devices.
"Much of what we hear about over the top has to do with changing consumer behavior," noted Terry Denson, Vice President of Content Strategy and Acquisition at Verizon Communications during one of the sessions at CES. "We see it more as an opportunity than a threat. If we as distributors can capture consumer expectations of being able to access content on multiple platforms and provide a seamless experience we are well positioned as long as content providers are not giving content away for free, we are well positioned."
Such moves would be important for the future, as operators seek to differentiate themselves with multiplatform content offerings, argued Dan York, President of Content at AT&T.
He noted that AT&T's U-verse IPTV offering has been the fastest growing multichannel provider in the US for five quarters in a row and that their all IP platform has positioned them aggressively rollout offerings for multiple platforms.
Some also argued that the market for OTT could see a shakeout. "The market is overcrowded," argued Rob Riordan, Executive Vice President of Cellcom. "The middle man is not going away. The consumer needs to have things made simple and that is where the carrier comes in. The person that wins will be the one who makes it simple."
Operators did worry, however, that programmers might undercut the multichannel business model by making more content available online for free and that they would demand extra fees for making content available on other devices.
"Subscribers should be able to access content that they've already paid for whenever and wherever they want," York noted. "It isn't our intent to charge for access to other devices and we think it should be one price."
"If they start to give away that content that undermines the core bread and butter" business models that have sustained both operators and programmers, he added.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 The question I've been asked most often this week is, "What were the highlights among the myriad new offerings at the 2011 International CES last week?"
And indeed, there was so much happening, with 140,000 people vying to see what was there and to have their products and services seen, that is was easy to be overwhelmed.
Here then is our insider's view of the five most compelling, promising, and exciting developments at CES from the unique perspective of the distributed computing industry: BitTorrent, Cyclops, Joyent, Octoshape, and Safe Communications.
BitTorrent, from its demo suite at the Palazzo, showed how it will enhance its torrent-managing BitTorrent mainstream software later this year with search and display features as part of Project Chrysalis, the company's endeavor to provide consumers with a seamless process from content discovery through play-back.
BitTorrent's creator Bram Cohen was on hand to show how Project Pheon is progressing, the company's two-year development effort leading toward a highly advanced and innovative streaming video solution to be called BitTorrent Live. Latency is much improved at this point.
The company also demonstrated alpha versions of two BitTorrent applications for the Android mobile platform. As part of that demo, streaming content was ported among several different networked devices
To ensure that these changes, which are targeted to appeal to a general mass audience, do not deter the more technically astute torrenters, uTorrent will not be altered in the same ways as the mainline client.
Chief Strategist Shahi Ghanem said the newest version of BitTorrent will launch its public beta near the end of the first quarter. The driver for this redesign is to make BitTorrent more user-friendly for the average person. In addition to making it simpler to find content and play it, the enhanced client will also make it easier to shift content from device to device and to transcode it from format to format.
The updated BitTorrent application will also add same-genre categories or channels of content to make browsing more efficient. Users will also be able to rate torrents in real-time.
For the consumer electronics (CE) manufacturers that comprise core attendees at CES, Ghanem also noted that the company is working on two open standards: one for connected devices including processor, storage, and network support hardware and one for non-connected devices such as hardware for making copies.
Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) will team with the company on a certification program to qualify components and product designs that comply with BitTorrent's standards.
Cyclops, from the company developing GenosTV, is an amazing all-in-one remote that takes the concept of universality to a new level. The new GenosTV Cyclops Multifunction Universal Controller was fully functioning on television sets with every type of signal source at CES.
Not only does the Cyclops function as a universal remote control for cable, satellite, and over-the-air TV, but also as a fully operational keyboard and mouse combo as well, making it the perfect gadget for the next generation of Internet-connected televisions and their IPTV services - including, of course, GenosTV itself.
Leading up to the show, new-media journalists speculated on Cyclops pairing with Google TV, but as the show opened, Cyclops was ready-for-prime-time, while Google TV was back on the drawing board.
The disc-shaped Cyclops, which was demo'd in private meetings in the North Exhibit Hall during the show, featured changeable fashion-color skins completing its very bold design, and represented truly everything anyone could want from a remote control.
Major international television manufacturers as well as TV programmers paid attention to this new product in a space that has not had as radical an entry as Cyclops in many years - if ever.
The R&D team behind the Cyclops Multifunctional Universal Controller has also been working to incorporate the set requisites and control codes of these major CE companies into the Cyclops firmware.
With partnerships among different television brands, the GenosTV Cyclops is sure to even further expand the universal remote's capabilities.
Joyent's SVP of Business Development Jonathan King, keynoting at CONTENT IN THE CLOUD, answered the cross-continental railroad metaphor established earlier in the session by Verizon Digital Media Services President David Rips in his own excellent keynote address by equating Joyent's cloud-based solutions to the light at the end of the tunnel.
Massive disruption is coming to the ecosystem surrounding today's datacenters that is similar to the previous transitions from legacy to circuit-switched to IP-based networks.
Joyent is the train speeding to the rescue with cloud-based solutions for both media creators and service providers. The first reason to use Joyent is to generate more revenue per square foot of datacenter. Joyent virtual machines (VMs) are two-to-five times faster than its leading competitors for comparable service offerings.
Telemetry and introspection (DTrace) are only available on Joyent with a graphic display showing latency patterns that can be used by developers to quickly diagnose MySQL query delays. By finding and correcting the causes of slowdowns in live production applications, the results are faster performance - and not blaming the broadband service provider for the problem.
Joyent's node.js service is the next "Ruby on Rails," only better. It is the only solution fast enough and light enough to support the "Internet of Things" and is ideal for MMO games, mobile apps, security/monitoring, and other machine-to-machine applications. HP webOS 2.0 has replaced Java with node.js.
Kabam, a leading developer of social games on Facebook, connecting millions of sports and TV fans through its extensive network of online fan communities, has extended that social product expertise to create innovative and engaging social games. Social-networking-based games can be a real headache to scale from an infrastructure point of view, but the Joyent cloud has virtually eliminated this problem for Kabam.
LinkedIn, with over a billion page-views per month set about to develop Bumper Sticker, one of the largest Ruby applications on the web. It runs on SmartMachines in the Joyent Public
Cloud. One engineer, one week, and a few Joyent SmartMachines later and Bumper Sticker was born, and got to a million users in just 46 days.
Gilt Groupe provides access to coveted fashion and luxury brands at prices up to 70% off retail. Each sale lasts 36 hours and features hand selected styles from a single
designer. Gilt.com, Gilt iPhone and iPad applications run in the Joyent SmartDataCenter. By deploying its infrastructure on Joyent, Gilt Groupe spends less than 1% of revenue on its total infrastructure investment. This is more than 70% better than the average company.
At CES, Octoshape premiered Cloudmass, which works essentially by aggregating and allocating the resources of multiple cloud service providers. Users don't need to plan for event capacity as they would when working with a single content delivery network (CDN) because Cloudmass dynamically expands and contracts with load demand requirements.
Cloudmass essentially leverages providers like Amazon, Softlayer, Rackspace, AT&T, and Microsoft, by auto-provisioning capacity as needed by the product's software.
Cloudmass actually refutes the prevailing assumption that proximity of servers to clients equates to quality, which has driven the creation of geographically dispersed CDN networks to ensure optimal delivery from the edge of their networks over the last-mile to end-users. Cloudmass offers far more flexible global cloud resources delivering potentially huge savings in terms of both capex and opex cost avoidance.
Cloudmass compliments Octoshape's native multicast, automatic multicast tunneling, and grid solutions to deliver high-quality video streaming over long distances with what Scott Brown, US GM for Octoshape rightly terms "resilient scalability."
And finally, at CES, Safe Communications launched beta registration for its MouseMail.com, the revolutionary patent-pending online security service that protects children online, and announced that tech expert Tom Campbell has joined their team as a senior advisor-board member.
Campbell, who is internationally recognized as a technology counselor to both the public and private sectors, has served as White House technology advisor in three administrations and received the Presidential Distinguished Service Award and special recognition on the floor of the US Senate.
MouseMail.com is a filter program that helps thwart cyber-bullying, sexting and other inappropriate language. Improper words and unknown contacts sent to kids' computer e-mails and cell-phones are forwarded, based on parameters that children and their parents establish together, directly to parent accounts to help manage their children's relationship to the Internet.
This free service allows parents to monitor other online activity for questionable or objectionable content.
MouseMail.com is the only messaging platform that flags and blocks messages containing offensive, bullying, or sexually-suggestive language before the child receives them, while allowing for communication with approved contacts.
The fully-operational beta phase launched with several new Safe Communications services designed to create a safe digital environment for children.
"MouseMail.com services give parents no-cost control and peace of mind," said John Venners, President of Safe Communications."Children's access to these technologies is a fact of life, and parental involvement in their digital communications is vital to keeping them safe."
The next generation of technology, to be released later this month, also marks the integration of several new features that add extra security on top of the filtering services.
Social Website Scanning and Global Scan Technology monitor social networking sites - including Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and YouTube - as well as blogs and other websites for questionable content posted on the child's page or written about them by another user.
DCIA representatives, like most CES attendees, were also awe-inspired by Samsung's Internet-connected TV, and numerous other innovations that, above all, marked a dramatic resurgence in the technology sector at this year's enormously successful event. Share wisely, and take care.
CONTENT IN THE CLOUD Conference at CES
Excerpted from The WHIR Report by David Snead
CES included a very detailed track discussing CONTENT IN THE CLOUD. While there are a number of interesting new ventures that were discussed during the panels, one nagging issue kept popping up: intellectual property (IP) rights. The presenters felt that the cloud, and particularly video in the cloud, presented a great opportunity to learn from the past.
Again and again presenters mentioned both the difficulty in securing the rights to distribute content through the cloud to end-users, and the possibility of piracy. I would argue that it's the fear, not the reality, of the last issue that is creating the problem.
At base, most content owners are almost paralyzed with fear over the prospect of their content being used in unauthorized ways. This causes them to impose draconian licensing terms on distributors or require use of technology that makes use by the end-user of the distributor's technology very difficult (Hello Silverlight!)
Several presenters made the point that it is likely the difficulty inherent in securing rights to creative content that is fueling piracy. There is a significant disconnect between what consumers see in creative content, and the rights underlying the content.
Consumers see a piece of music, or television show, as a single piece of work. However, underlying the work is a complex web of rights. Because the businesses who create these works have not figured out how, or are unwilling, to restructure these rights, end-users are employing new technologies to enjoy "their" content on connected devices without waiting for the creative community to figure out who is going to make what money.
End-users want to enjoy their content, not be educated, or subjected to complex business models necessary to sustain outdated rights. With the exception of one presenter, the panelists each agreed that the success of iTunes, and failure of PressPlay, shows that if rights holders embrace, and work with, new technologies, end-users will pay for correctly licensed content.
So how does this relate to the cloud? By providing an easy, flexible, and potentially inexpensive, source of computing power, the cloud offers end-users the ability to consume creative content in an almost unlimited manner.
In particular, the use of the cloud to store and consume video creates a large market for cloud providers and content creators as well. Rights owners and cloud operators and the cloud operator's customers need to be proactive and discuss how, together, they might make business models work. It is to everyone's benefit to engage in businesses that people want to pay for.
The potential the cloud offers is a very large market with end-users actually consuming more content than they do today. This gives rights owners the ability to increase the consumption of their individual content.
However, it will also require some creative thinking, and possibly a reduction in individual fees. The likelihood of a larger market will actually result in a net increase in those fees. Most importantly, it will require the rights owning community to stop saying to the technology community: "here is a license, you figure out your business model."
The collapse of the CD market indicates that this strategy is a loser. The cloud offers the video industry the opportunity to learn from this mistake.
CES Provided Signs of Economic Life
Excerpted from Marketing Daily Report by Aaron Baar
If one needed any proof that the economy is starting to show signs of life again, the just-wrapped Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held it. More populated and more crowded than the previous year's show (although official attendance figures had not been released at press time), it seems that CE companies, buyers and dealers all expect consumers to begin spending again.
And spend they will. In his keynote remarks, Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) President Gary Shapiro said the industry would produce revenues of $180 million in 2010, 6% higher than the previous year. The organization also forecast that revenues would increase another 3% in 2011 to $186.4 billion in 2011.
"The big story in CE in 2010 was the sudden infiltration of tablets into the mainstream, which will continue well into the New Year. In 2011, the industry foresees additional sales growth allowing CE revenues to achieve a new sales summit," said Steve Koenig, the CEA's director of industry analysis, in a release exploring the forecast.
Connectivity was the theme of this year's show, with many companies showing how one could live a completely connected life, moving content across a series of screens throughout a day. Internet-connected televisions, tablets, and phones were the focus of many showcases, while several companies showed off prototypes of connected appliances that could determine the most energy-efficient times to run or how often one opens the refrigerator.
Accordingly, the support that will enable such connectivity was another underlying theme of the show. Verizon and T-Mobile staged elaborate presentations to showcase their recently launched 4G networks and the bevy of tablets and smart-phones) that would be available for them. In his opening keynote address, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg said the increased prevalence of high-speed networks was pressuring consumer electronics companies to "accelerate the cycle of innovation and growth that drives the industry forward."
"People are using technology to erase the boundaries between home and work, here and there, virtual and real," Seidenberg said. "They imagine access to everything at their fingertips and they want it now, no matter where they are or what screen they have at hand. They are challenging us to deliver better products, faster networks, more simplicity and more creativity."
Indeed. It's not surprising that automakers ranging from Ford, GM, Audi and Toyota were all in Las Vegas showing off their connectivity services. Given the United States' car culture, increased connectivity availability means more people connecting from their cars. "We'll start to see more of those utility functions," Ross Rubin, director of analysis at NPD, tells Marketing Daily. "Some manufacturers may explore building a cellular connection directly in the cars."
At the same time, some technology enablers are looking for ways to expand their technologies beyond their own brands. On-Star announced that it would soon begin selling an after-market rear-view mirror add-on that would allow the owner of any car - new or old, GM-made or not - to access the well-known (and heavily marketed) On-Star services. Similarly, LG also announced that it would make its connected-TV platform available to anyone with an HDMI cable. "If we're going to get value for the OnStar brand, we can't just be in the GM cars," OnStar President Chris Preuss said of his company's expansion. "The brand is highly respected and trusted. That gives us a chance to expand in ways we hadn't considered."
Finally, it seems that CE companies aren't going to let go of the dream of 3D television. Sony's press briefing was almost entirely centered on 3D technologies, from television sets to handheld cameras to entertainment alliances that would bring more 3D programming into the home. Similarly, every other television maker had its own expanded line of 3D televisions. Some, like Toshiba and Sony, were even willing to display their prototypes of 3D televisions that don't require the use of glasses (although viewing is still restricted to a very limited range in front of the TV).
"It's a second chance for 3D television," Rubin says. "We're going to see prices come down and new technologies deployed to get around the expense of the glasses."
Of course, the bigger question - whether consumers will consider buying a 3D TV that requires glasses when they get wind of new versions that won't require them are around the corner - remains unanswered.
A TV-Internet Marriage Awaits Blessings of All Parties
Excerpted from NY Times Report by Brian Stelter
The blending of television and the Internet is inevitable. But will it happen in concert with the major cable and satellite distributors, or in spite of them?
That question loomed large at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last week as manufacturers promoted Internet-connected television sets and companies like Cisco and Sony talked about "redefining television." All involved know that connecting the Internet to television and vice versa could solidify the distributors' place in the food chain - or greatly erode it.
"We want to use all this technology to make a better consumer experience," Glenn Britt, chief executive of Time Warner Cable, said in an interview after speaking on stage here. A better experience, it stands to reason, will help Time Warner Cable and other cable companies retain customers, protecting the lucrative subscription TV business from the prospect of cord-cutting. It will also help manufacturers sell more hardware for the living room.
During the trade show, however, there was a point in every demonstration where fantasy collided with reality - and it was usually when the cable and satellite distributors came up.
"The idea here is to work with cable," said Google's Rishi Chandra as he showed off Google TV to Julius Genachowski, the Federal Communications Commission Chairman, on Friday afternoon. When working together, Google TV can seamlessly find live television channels, recorded shows, on-demand options and Web streams. So far, though, it works that way only with Dish Network.
"Right now," Mr. Chandra said, "we're limited."
After seeing television setups at the show, Mr. Genachowski said, "They're incentivizing the cable companies to innovate."
At the show, media and technology executives largely agreed with that sentiment. And signs of innovation were evident: Time Warner Cable, one of the biggest cable operators, announced that it would start delivering programming via its network straight into some Sony and Samsung television sets, removing the need for a set-top cable television box.
The so-called smart TVs receive video via the Internet, protect the video as directed by the content owners, and display it all with a program guide that is much slicker than the ones that most people are saddled with now. Time Warner Cable customers who buy the television sets will have a cable television app on the program guide next to a YouTube app and a Facebook app, all tied together by a search bar.
Many distributors "will have an app for us" over time, predicted Stuart Silloway, a training manager for Samsung Electronics America.
Also last week, Comcast and Time Warner Cable announced that they would replicate their live channel lineups on tablet computers. Other distributors like Verizon and Cablevision are working on similar features. (Of course, the channels themselves are also scurrying to reach consumers on tablets, too.)
The move onto tablets is part of a recognition by the Comcasts and Verizons of the world that they have to keep up with changing consumer habits.
"If you buy a video subscription from us in your home, our goal is to make the video available on all your devices," Mr. Britt of Time Warner said, echoing the goal of the "TV Everywhere" concept espoused by his and other companies. He added, "People don't see PCs and phones and tablets and TVs as different things. They are all just video display devices."
Making a television subscription available on all those devices is wrenchingly difficult, because of a maze of copyrights and sometimes contradictory content strategies. At first, the live streams to tablets will be available only in customers' homes, the distributors indicated last week. But that is still progress.
Stand-alone boxes that bring the Internet to big-screen TVs have not caught on with the public, but including that functionality in televisions may make it more popular.
It was learned last week that the remote controls for some Blu-ray players and connected televisions will come with red Netflix buttons this year, which is sure to "cause some consternation among those concerned about cable service cord-cutting," wrote David Joyce of Miller Tabak and Company in an analyst's note. But Mr. Joyce is optimistic that cable and satellite companies will adapt.
Sensing a big business opportunity, companies are lining up to bolster "TV Everywhere" and, thus, the cable companies. John Chambers, the chief executive of Cisco, proclaimed at a news conference Wednesday that "video is the next voice." He said that Cisco had a software and hardware architecture package called Videoscape to blend television and Internet video sources.
In demonstrations, Cisco imagined an on-screen guide with three columns - the largest column being the television channels provided by the distributor, the second column being Web content, and the third being videos and photos from friends and family members. That guide was replicated on laptops, tablets and smartphones.
Cisco and Motorola, with a prototype of something it called "MediOS," want customers to be able to quickly shift a television show or a Web video from one screen to another, and to be able to see what friends are watching at the same time. But that will take deals with distributors - and big investments.
As an example, the Google TV setup works well when it is fully tied into a distributors' system, as it is with Dish Network. "But because there's no integrated ability to control tuners - to stream content - it's not standard," Mr. Chandra told Mr. Genachowski on Friday during a tour of the trade show floor. "It's going to take years and years and years to negotiate the integrations," Mr. Chandra added.
For content owners, it is a confusing time. At the trade show, companies like News Corporation and the CBS Corporation held court with all manner of manufacturers and in a couple of cases announced new pacts. CBS will soon start allowing users of Boxee, an Internet television software package, to buy episodes of shows like "CSI."
One senior media executive deemed the Internet TV marketplace a "jump ball," with television makers, distributors and content owners all participating. "That's why we have to talk to everybody," said the executive, who insisted on anonymity because those talks are private.
What is still lacking, in large part, is consumer education about Internet-connected TVs - but that will change. The Sony chief executive, Howard Stringer, announced Wednesday that Sony would start a worldwide advertising campaign called "Television Redefined" this year.
"The next evolution is upon us: the marriage of the television and the Internet," he said that day, without specifying who would officiate at the wedding.
Send in the Clouds: Ultraviolet Stores Content Forever
Excerpted from MediaDailyNews Report by Wayne Friedman
Can't figure out where you left that DVD you just bought - or perhaps rented? Here comes Ultraviolet.
Just when you thought there were plenty of ways to access TV and film content, Ultraviolet, a studio-backed initiative (but not Walt Disney, which is going in another direction) is a cloud-based system where consumers can "store" a particular purchase of, say, a movie where it - in theory - can't be lost.
Six studios are behind Ultraviolet - Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures and Lionsgate. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, a major panel featured a consortium called the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), which is behind Ultraviolet.
Representatives from Microsoft, NBC Universal, Samsung, Best Buy and Warner Bros. spoke. Two other major players in this arena were present, which panelists acknowledged, but hope to include at some later date. They were Apple and Disney, which is working on something similar to Ultraviolet called KeyChest.
Ultraviolet would give the consumers essentially "perpetual" rights to a piece of content, which would sit in a cloud-system. It would also allow consumers to more easily play content on a variety of screens - TVs, computers, mobile, and gaming devices - as well as the ability to share that content with a limited number of friends/ family.
One of the keys for consumers comes from the branding of Ultraviolet. Given many kinds of digital distribution points for content, a movie or TV show would have an Ultraviolet logo on a consumer's copy of that content. The goal is to reduce piracy.
Hollywood studios say Ultraviolet would lift sales of movies and TV shows, helping to improve the home entertainment market, which continues to see declines after five straight years. Total revenue from DVD, high-definition Blu-ray discs and digital sales and rentals of movies and television shows declined 3% to $18.8 billion in 2010.
The good news here was that losses narrowed from a nearly 8% decline in 2009.
Forty-six technology companies and retailers - including Best Buy, Comcast, Samsung, and Toshiba - are backing Ultraviolet.
CES 2011 - The Biggest Winners and Losers
Excerpted from TechRepublic Report by Jason Hiner
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is the Super Bowl of the technology industry. As much as industry analysts and the tech press whine about CES being too big and being a relic of a bygone era, there's no better place for tech companies to make a big splash that will be remembered throughout the year, and in some cases for years to come.
It's also the place where tech companies can jockey for a better position in the market by generating more attention for their product line than a competitor's. Conversely, companies that don't make a good showing at CES can risk creating an impression that they are falling behind and risk having their products get lost in the crowd.
As such, every CES has its winners and losers. Here is this year's scoreboard.
First, the winners.
Motorola Mobility the new Motorola spinoff that went live as a separate entity on the New York Stock Exchange on Monday of CES week. This new company focuses entirely on consumer devices and their first CES couldn't have been scripted any better.
In partnership with Google and Verizon, they officially announced the new flagship Android tablet, the Motorola Xoom. They announced one of the first high-powered smart-phones running on Verizon's LTE 4G network, the Droid Bionic.
And, to top it all off, they unveiled the breakthrough product of CES 2011, the Motorola Atrix, a smartphone that doubles as a legitimate PC replacement with both desktop and laptop docks.
In the past, Verizon Wireless has saved most of its big product announcements for some of the telcom-specific trade shows or its own private announcements.
This year, the company came to CES with both guns blazing. On the heels of the successful US launch last month of its 4G LTE network - which is, arguably, now the world's most advanced 4G Internet experience - Verizon had LTE live in Las Vegas and ready to show off the world's largest annual crowd of technology enthusiasts.
The network performed like a champ. And, on the official opening day of CES, Verizon held press conference announcing 10 LTE devices - smart-phones, tablets, and hotspots - that will launch during the first half of the year.
It was an impressive roster of devices from leading vendors such as Samsung, Motorola, HTC, and LG. The Motorola Xoom tablet and the HTC Thunderbolt were especially impressive. I spent 25 minutes using the Thunderbolt and was blown away by the speeds generated by the combination of its high-end hardware paired with Verizon LTE.
The company that was seemingly everywhere at CES 2011 was NVIDIA. Specifically, the dual core NVIDIA Tegra2 was the processor du jour, showing up in many of the new smart-phones, tablets, and even car-tech announcements.
At CES, NVIDIA announced that it is partnering with ARM to launch its own high-performance CPU cores the size of a dime. This is the long-rumored "Project Denver" that NVIDIA has been working on and it will likely position the company as a leading powerhouse in the next generation computing, since ARM processors power nearly all of the smartphones and tablets coming to market and are now scaling up to run PCs and servers as well.
NVIDIA looks like it could become the Intel of the next great wave of computing.
Samsung deserves an honorable mention.
And now, the losers.
This is beginning to sound like a broken record, but I'm still waiting to hear any hint of Microsoft's vision of where it sees the computing world headed in the decade ahead and how Microsoft plans to take us there. We didn't get it at CES 2011 even though Microsoft once again had the biggest stage - the opening keynote the night before the official opening of CES.
Microsoft squandered its opportunity to set the agenda of the tech industry. Instead, it simply trotted out its standard stump speech on "Windows everywhere" and replayed many of the same demos from its 2010 product launches. Then, once the show opened, many of Microsoft's traditional PC partners spent CES spotlighting their tablets instead of new netbooks or laptops running Windows 7.
Microsoft's newly-launched Windows Phone 7 devices got completely overshadowed as partners HTC, Samsung, and LG put their new Android smart-phones front-and-center. And, at a show dominated by the launch of new tablets, we heard nothing from Microsoft about its tablet plans. Even Microsoft's long-time partner Intel criticized Microsoft's missing tablet strategy.
Sony's CES story is not unlike Microsoft's. Where's the leadership? Where's the vision? Sony has traditionally been the biggest name in the consumer electronics industry. It should dominate CES. But, when's the last time you heard about a breakthrough product from Sony? When's the last time you heard about a market-leading product from Sony?
Its competitors have been running circles around it, and it was no different at CES 2011. Sony put on some glitzy presentations, but lacked the product leadership. Much of that was due to the fact that Sony focused most of its energy on the wrong thing - 3D TV.
While Sony had perhaps the most impressive 3D television at CES, that's a dubious distinction akin to having the nicest house in a neighborhood scheduled for demolition. Contrast that to what Samsung did at CES. It delivered thin, high-quality, reasonably priced (non-3D) TVs - the ones people actually want to buy. But, TVs weren't Samsung's only story. They unveiled exciting new smart-phones, tablets, and PCs, including one of the most innovative new products at CES, the Sliding PC 7, a hybrid laptop/tablet.
One of the major trends at CES 2011 was the acceleration of the world to mobile computing. With the unveiling of dual core smart-phones, over 80 new tablets, smart-phones that also serve as PCs (the Motorola Atrix), and an emerging new category of hybrid tablet/laptops, it's clear that technology companies are rising to meet the demands of users, who are spending more and more of their computing time using mobile devices instead of traditional PCs.
If you look closely at this army of new devices - which were the headliners of CES - almost none of them are running Intel processors. Practically the whole fleet of these devices are running ARM processors in general and the dual core NVIDIA Tegra2 specifically.
Intel has known that this trend was coming. I remember Intel presenting a slide at the 2008 Intel Developer Conference showing how sales of mobile devices were going to rapidly overtake traditional PCs in the years ahead. Intel attempted to meet this trend with its Menlow and Moorestown processors for "Mobile Internet Devices" (MIDs), a category that it tried to create with its hardware and software partners.
However, Intel's chips couldn't match the low-power efficiency of ARM chips and rise of smart-phones crowded MIDs out of the market. Instead of going back to the drawing board and making a more power-efficient class of mobile chips, Intel continues to fall behind. While NVIDIA chips were powering nearly all of the tablets and high-end smart-phones at CES, Intel played up its "Sandy Bridge" chips for multimedia PCs. This focus on high-end chips feels like a tacit admission that Intel has no answer in mobile.
Major Labels Have Spent Nearly $100 Million on Lobbying Since 2000
Excerpted from Digital Music News Report
There's a huge debate right now over how much the recording industry should be spending on the Hill. But has an expenditure level of nearly $100 million since 2000 gotten the labels anything?
The estimate of "over $90 million" comes from the Center for Responsive Politics, which tallied the amount using lobbying filings. What started with a measly $4 million in 2000 ballooned to $17.5 million by 2009, according to the company.
And, the tally doesn't include hard-to-track efforts involving groups like the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Oh, and legal fees related to endless lawsuits have topped $50 million over the period, according to the estimate, though the RIAA claims that a lot of that money comes back in settlements.
Either way, this sounds like money well squandered, except when you consider how much the other side is spending. And why should the ISPs, wireless carriers, and Googles of the world get all the advantage? After all, the DMCA is heavily tilted against content owners, and legislation doesn't just magically appear - the wheels of Washington are greased with Benjamins. On top of that, heavy-handed enforcement bills like COICA are being viewed as victories and signs of progress.
Then again, this is $100 million we're talking about, an amount that could have been used inside the industry to better combat disruption. Or, 'embrace' technological chaos, instead of suing, lobbying, and 'educating' against it.
Thanks to Intellectual Property Watch for the tip.
Coming Events of Interest
Global Services Conference 2011 - January 27th in New York, NY. Cloud computing has implications not only for IT services but also for business processing; cloud-based delivery models present a discontinuous and disruptive shift that will redefine how IT and BPO services are delivered. The conference will present actionable propositions to leverage cloud-based models.
Digital Music Conference East - February 24th in New York, NY. The 11th Annual DMCE is the only event in the United States that brings together the top music, technology and policy leaders for high-level discussions and debate, intimate meetings and unrivaled networking.
Cloud Connect Conference - March 8th-10th in Santa Clara, CA. Learn about all the latest cloud computing innovations in the Cloud Connect Conference -- designed to serve the needs of cloud customers and operators - where you will see the latest cloud technologies and platforms and identify opportunities in the cloud.
Media Summit New York - March 9th-10th in New York, NY. This event is the premier international conference on media, broadband, advertising, television, publishing, cable, mobile, radio, magazines, news & print media, and marketing.
CONTENT IN THE CLOUD at MSNY - March 10th in New York, NY. What are the latest cloud computing offerings that will have the greatest impact on the entertainment sector? How is cloud computing being harnessed to benefit the digital distribution of movies, television programs, music, and games?
1st International Conference on Cloud Computing - May 7th-9th in Noordwijkerhout, Netherlands. This first-ever event focuses on the emerging area of cloud computing, inspired by some latest advances that concern the infrastructure, operations, and available services through the global network.
|
