Live from CES, 8 January 2009 8 January 2009
Posted by Steve Blum in Tellus Venture Associates.Tags: CES, consumer electronics show, echostar, Intel, iptv, municipal wireless, Nokia, panasonic, verizon, wirelesshd
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- WirelessHD press conference. Certification ready. 60GHz standard to link devices inside the same room to HDMI standards.
- Clear thinker: Paul Liao, CTO Panasonic. Uses Maslow’s hierarchy to rate & rank tech features.
- Clear, though, that there’s still a battle to be fought over how to split up content and application revenue in the wireless world.
- Recognition that consumers will have lots of devices, but don’t want to pay lots of money to connect them all. There’s hope.
- Went to Wireless Meets CE panel. Nokia, Intel, Panasonic, Verizon represented. Vague consensus: 1 sub fee/device model will “evolve”.
- Heading to LVCC, bus line wasn’t long at all.
- Charlie Ergen: kids love IPTV & it will spread from there. Complicated now but just wait.
- DISH will sell 1080p downloads via Internet.
- ETC pres Mark Jackson keynotes DISH news conf, doesn’t say “satellite” once. It’s about TV!
- IPTV is now an integrated feature in mainstream TV products, services & platforms.
- SlingGuide puts personal content search & control online.
- SlingLoaded distributes video: TVs, PCs, iPhone, car, whatever.
- EchoStar intros STB with IPTV, new “SlingLoaded” navigation across all video sources.
- Waiting for EchoStar press conf to start.
- At Sands, show feels empty so far.
WirelessHD tranceivers
Ho-Hum IPTV is Software Dev Opportunity 8 January 2009
Posted by Steve Blum in Tellus Venture Associates.Tags: CES, cisco, consumer electronics show, content navigation, hard disk drive, iptv, netgear, software, solid state drive, sony
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Internet protocol television is the it’s-good-to-be-boring story of CES 2009. Everyone (or nearly so), from Netgear to Sony, integrates some kind of IPTV functionality in their consumer product lines. It’s going from being a distinct and geeky category to just being a standard feature of mainstream television products.
It’s good news for software developers and component manufacturers. Drive manufacturers, to pick one example, have an opportunity to sell their products into television sets, more set top boxes (not just DVRs), and home media centers.
There’s a window of opportunity opening briefly for software developers. No one has completely solved the twin problems of navigating and storing content. Boxee offers an open source users interface. It could turn into a common development platform, but only because it’s open source.
"Linksys by Cisco" is company's latest consumer branding strategy. It doesn't exactly trip off the tongue, but it's a start.
Storage isn’t a technical problem. Hard drives are big and cheap, and solid state drives are rapidly heading in that direction. The problem is finding and accessing your stuff, once you’ve downloaded it to one device and you want to access it on another.
Cisco introduced a home media hub, that they say can catalog all the media on your local network, plus manage Internet media sources. It includes a big hard drive, which you can use to store your stuff, but that’s almost incidental. If it really works — for ordinary consumers, not just for technophiles — it’s a big step forward in solving the navigation and storage problem.
A real killer app has yet to appear, though. Most manufacturers are simply adding IPTV extensions to whatever content navigation and management platforms they already deploy. Any bets on whether that will be enough?
