Adam Gifford: Finger locks and format wars in Vegas

COMMENT


Las Vegas is the city of tacky glitz, spectacular shows and non-stop gambling. Which makes it the ideal venue for one of the world's largest trade exhibitions, the annual Consumer Electronic Show (CES).

This is where consumer electronics companies, and increasingly computer companies, come to lay down their bets in the marketplace.

Struggling through the vast exhibition space, many of the bets seemed of the "me too" variety - "I'll take your 1m flat panel plasma screen and raise it to 1.5m."

There were thousands of screens, hundreds of digital camera/camcorder combos, and lots of visions on how to tie all this digital content creation together and play it back in the home.

CES has always been good for a gimmick, and there were dozens on display this year.

Always losing your keys? You need the ArrowVision Shepherd 210 fingerprint operated lock, only $910.

Video games turning your kids into blobs? Load the games onto the Powergrid Fitness Kilowatt machine, which makes you stand up and push on a bar to control the action. Instead of light touches on a mouse or joystick, playing a game becomes an isometric workout.

Or maybe you want an add-on games console from Sony Ericsson to make it easier to play games on your mobile phone. Or a little racing car you can control with your Bluetooth phone.

There were any number of devices for viewing films, playing games and listening to music on the go. One such toy, the $450 Tapwave from Zodiac, won PC Magazine's "last gadget standing" competition, beating out the XM SKYFi audio system from Delphi, a satellite radio which allows listeners to pick up dozens of commercial-free radio stations wherever they are in the United States.

As to what content is available for the MPEG players, one person on the Samsung stand said the company had been approached by a crew from the adult video convention being held at the same time across town, suggesting a tie-up. It was, he said, not a bad idea, if you consider the sort of MPEGs people actually download from the web. The porn industry has always been an enthusiastic adopter of new technology and formats, often driving early sales as volumes rise.

CES was the show where DVD debuted in 1995. It took a few years for DVD sales to ramp up, but it's now the standard format for home movie distribution, accounting for $26.5 billion in sales and rentals in the United States last year.

Sales of DVD players jumped 25 per cent last year to total just over $4.6 billion, but with many of those sales driven by falling prices, the industry is looking for the next thing with that "wow" factor to justify a high-margin sale.

That thing could be Blu-ray or BD, a CD-sized disc format which can take up to 50GB, compared with the 8.5GB limit on DVD. As importantly, Blu-ray supports data rates of up to 36 Megabits a second, meaning it is suitable as a storage and playback format for High Definition TV.

But there will always be format wars, and in this case there is HD-DTV, which will take 30GB.

As Hewlett Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina pointed out in her keynote, the digital revolution has finally arrived. Every process and all content is becoming digital, mobile and virtual.

That creates problems for the content providers, particularly the movie studios. The last thing they want is to have file sharing of movies, in the same way music became so extensively shared.

Fiorina said HP would build, acquire or license content protection technologies for its devices and work with anti-piracy industry advocates.

It will also resell the Apple iPod under its own brand and ship Apple's iTunes software on its devices.

Talking about digital content allowed Fiorina to solicit some celebrity endorsements for her approach, as she brought on stage music stars including producer Jimmy Iovine, U2 guitarist Edge, Sheryl Crow, country star Toby Keith, rapper Dr Dre and current chart-topper Alicia Keyes.

However, consumers have shown an inclination to find their way around such clunky copy-protection mechanisms.

So how does this technofest affect New Zealand consumers, apart from the sort of devices that will show up in stores soon?

HDTV is driving most of the US sales, and that in turn is driven by cable. Attempts to get cable going in New Zealand were blocked by Telecom's aggressive anti-competitive tactics, and it is only available in parts of Christchurch, Wellington and Kapiti. Without true broadband internet and digital television providers, the only reason to buy the big screens is to watch DVDs on.

* Adam Gifford attended CES as a guest of Panasonic.