CES 2005 - More Tech Notes From the Floor

Closing Thoughts

For many of us, CES doesn't give us any really juicy details in small dosages. The show floor is usually crammed with products that we already saw on roadmaps three months ago.

CES Predictions in '05: Media Center

CES was all about media "integrated" devices - TVs, set top boxes, PCs - all running some form of Windows and all doing the same thing, but with different degrees of quality. The SBC demonstration during the Keynote on Tuesday showed us the power of a handheld phone previewing a clip of a broadcast before the MCE device was told to record a four stream IPTV feed remotely.

MCE has some competition. CyberLink and InterVideo were both very pleased to demonstrate their MCE clones; SageTV and BeyondTV had powerful presences on the floor; we even found a tiny booth running their next generation set top box on the Linux based MythTV. The non-MCE devices have some advantages over MCE including multiple tuners, transcoding abilities, commercial skip, etc. But, on the other hand, Microsoft's partnership announcement with TiVo, Comcast, SBC and content providers like Starz!, Viacom and MLB may be too overwhelming. After all, Content is King. CyberLink was probably the most prevalent media player on the floor outside of MCE as multiple partnerships announced that they would ship their devices with CyberLink's media center free, including CoolerMaster, Hauppauge and ASUS.

Whether or not Microsoft will come out on top of the MCE war is moot. The message is that multifunction, set top box replacements and improvements are here to stay and we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg as more companies start to embrace the idea. Case manufacturers are putting LCD displays on their units to interface better for media devices; Hauppage is putting multiple tuners on a single card; NVIDIA and ATI are integrating video optimizations on their hardware; and, motherboard manufacturers are creating ultra-small, ultra-cool PCs designed specifically for the HTPC market. No matter where we turned to on the floor, someone had something new to bring to the media center.

CES Predictions in '05: Phone

Like many others who have recently adopted VOIP solutions, I took a personal interest in investigating SIPs, Vonage and other VOIP solutions. Voice Over IP drew a very mixed crowd at the show. On one hand, Microsoft and SBC gave the demonstration during the keynote demonstrating "integrated" devices and phones transmitting data to MCE devices and set top boxes - but not on a WiFi network! On the other hand, you have the push from services like Vonage, Kiwi and Soyo that would love to see WiFi everywhere. Although it might have just been my personal opinion, it seems as though there is a large push to converge as many devices as possible, yet leave WiFi off voice devices that could use WiFi for VOIP. Palm and ASUS, for example, were happy to show us their newest GSM enabled devices that lack 802.11 capabilities. Vonage was very excited about debuting their VOIP WiFi phone, but the phone was nowhere near as polished as something that we would see from Motorola or Siemens. I would certainly embrace a GSM/WiFi hybrid phone that could switch between VOIP and GSM depending on my proximity to an 802.11 hotspot. Most likely, it will take a PC manufacturer and a VOIP provider like Vonage to spec out a product like that, and hopefully, we won't have to wait until CES 2006 to see it.