CES: Previews & Prognostications

(CBS)  CBSNews.com's Digital Dan Dubno reports from Las Vegas on this year's Consumer Electronics Show.

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"Gee, you're going to have a great time," said a colleague as I packed up my laptops, several digital cameras, and a three-chip high-end Sony video camera. The Consumer Electronics Show begins tomorrow in Las Vegas, but for the past two months, every publicist (and his or her sister) has been calling, emailing, or stalking our office to make sure we don't miss a thing at the world's largest trade show. "Great time?" I'm not sure. But it promises to be an awesome spectacle with a torrent of technology.

Officially, CES exhibits cover more ground than some 38 football fields in two huge convention-center locations. Unofficially, the world's electronics, gaming, video, audio, web, broadcasting, wireless, automotive, and toy industries (whew!) expand into nearly every hotel room, ballroom, restaurant, club, mobile home, and tent throughout Las Vegas. This is the "Big One": the grand stewpot where next Christmas' hottest presents will be unveiled... where purveyors of software and hardware will solemnly renew vows of convergence... where corporate monopolists and the solitary inventor/dreamer co-mingle.

It seems fitting to awake from the excesses of Christmas and New Years to this Las Vegas hangover at CES. Each year, editors struggle to find a unifying "theme" within the morass of products and services. Gadget-nuts, like myself, endure four days of new-improved-faster-battery-powered-miniaturized-hype to discover a few revolutionary (even disruptive) technologies. We revisit the old battlefields: AMD vs. INTEL; BluRay vs. HD DVD; Microsoft (slightly battered) vs. Everyone Else. Every year, the keynote stages are set; the million-dollar booths redesigned; the blue-chip entertainers rolled out after glitzy press events. At stake: what technologies will be favored, what consumer products will be purchased, and what media channels will dominate.

Here, companies strive to manage risks when introducing the new, the daring, and the untested. While many of my press colleagues attend dozens of choreographed conferences and "previews", I have a different strategy: get a bunch of brilliant friends and gadget-lovers and send them off in all directions to report. Over the next few days we'll try to separate precious golden grains from the techno-chaff thrown in our way.

Attempting to predict news is always foolhardy. So, forgive me, here are some predictions and prognostications for this years' CES:

The battle for a single high-definition DVD-recording standard will continue to frustrate content providers and consumers as neither BluRay nor HD DVD win decisive victories… creating more confusion in the high-definition marketplace for at least another year.

Despite the hiccup in achieving an HD DVD recording standard, high definition broadcast displays will become orders of magnitude larger, thinner, though marginally less expensive.

Phone technologies will provide vast new on-demand video and music download offerings including an array of live video content. The mantra of "time shifting" is being replaced by "place shifting" as your control of content will move anywhere.

Handheld satellite radio devices and portable media viewers (that synchronize with home DVR systems) will give consumers access to entire libraries of content on the go.

New announcements in digital rights management software will make music and video downloads cheaper and more useful. Companies, like Microsoft, have begun to aggressively address consumer dissatisfaction with difficulty of moving purchased content between different devices.

There will be an explosion of new GPS and location-aware devices leading to a greater array of geographical services. (Many traditional electronics companies that have never occupied the GPS space will offer their own portable devices for the first time.) These location-aware technologies will become the foundation for future tools that will assist consumers to make decisions based on where they are.

A torrent of home automation products will be released that will be easier and less expensive to use.

Most of this will happen here this week if we can believe the thousand press-releases and pre-CES prattle we've endured for the past two months.

Vegas awaits: long lines, endless aisles of booths, a myriad of prototypes (made tenderly of composite plastics and, sometimes, hand-carved out of wood!) The shock of the new (and agonies of hype and the same-old-same-old) will greet us. We have a pair of good walking shoes and a hefty-video camera to send back video-blogs. For all of my belly-aching, I can't think of a place I'd rather be: wading through the wires, widgets, and wackos.
After all, I'm "Digital Dan," and we'll get right back to you.