I did not attend CES 2006! My company did not have a booth but we did have an Executive Suite at one of the ritzy Vegas hotels. It's a time-honored business practice that gives small businesses a presence at important events and shows without incurring the expense and effort of manning a booth on the floor. I did follow all the excellent web reporting which was thoroughly covered by the blogosphere; Endgadget did a particularly good job. I was also lucky enough to have one of our hardware partners visit our Technology & Development Irvine office after the show and I got some first-hand impressions. Interestingly enough they did not man a booth either but could not pass up the chance to attend one of the biggest networking events for anyone with a remote connection to the consumer electronics business. One comment in particular has stayed with me for weeks; a sharp, seasoned gentleman with many CES shows under his belt, dismissed the whole experience with the observations that "...every year is the same thing: Bigger TV's, smaller phones and more complex gadgets..."  I don't know if this is a sentiment shared by other hardware manufacturers but I do know that this gentleman missed several major announcements that herald something truly remarkable: The delivery of digital media to the masses, anytime, anywhere, anyhow.

We all know that iTunes, aided by the ultra-cool iPod, has become the de-facto gold standard for digital music delivery. Never mind the more "open" MP3 players on the market and the plethora of good, competitive on-line music services such as f.y.e. Musicmatch, Napster, Rhapsody, Virgin Digital, Walmart and more recently Yahoo Music. And we already got a taste of what is possible with video when Apple, in another stroke of genius, introduced the new iPod with "...150 hours of video..."   The naysayers mocked the tiny screen but I got a first-hand education on the power of cool when I saw my teenagers salivating over their new Christmas presents. Predictably, they downloaded their CD music and bought a few new tracks but within days my sixteen year old son had several surfing and snowboarding podcasts while my thirteen year old daughter happily spent $1.99 for a snazzy music video instead of $0.99 for the simple music track. A couple of weeks later I would learn that iTunes hit the 1 million video download mark.

What has happened at CES 2006 shifts digital media delivery into high gear: Movie channel Starz introduced Vongo an on-demand or pay-per-view service that allows movie downloads to PC's or future MS Portable Devices using MS subscription technology (read no iPod support.)  Microsoft announced that it is teaming up with MTV to launch Urge, a new music service tailored to the MTV crowd. Motorola, after deciding to "screw the nano"  announced its own iRadio service tailored to the device "...you're never without...your iRadio enabled (Motorola) mobile phone..."  Well, if you are going to listen to music on your cell phone, Verizon wants to make sure that you do it through their V CAST Music service just like Sprint did pre-CES with their Sprint Music Store.  How do we know this is all for real? Google also got into the fray , even if they had to brand their new Video service "Beta." Even Tivo has a strategy on how to profit from the digital media delivery revolution. Traditional TV broadcasters such as NBC and ABC are adjusting to the new business models by providing their content on iTunes while CNN and others align to the classic models by providing free videos supported by short ads.

One thing is clear to me, CES 2006 was not about the hardware: "...Bigger TV's, smaller phones and more complex gadgets..." It was about the software: Delivering digital media to all that hardware!

Labels: cell, wireless