‘Ultra HDTV’ sets expected to draw eyes at flagging show
At the biggest trade show in the Americas, which kicks off Tuesday in Las Vegas, television makers will be doing their best to convince consumers that HDTVs are old hat and that they should make room for “Ultra HDTV.”
It’s the latest gambit from an industry struggling with a shift in consumer spending from TVs, PCs and single-purpose devices such as camcorders to small, portable, do-it-all gadgets: smart phones and tablets.
The Consumer Electronics Association estimates that device shipments to U.S. buyers fell 5 percent in dollar terms last year excluding smart phones and tablets, but rose 6 percent to $207 billion when including those categories.
The trends suggest that the International CES (formerly the Consumer Electronics Show) is losing its stature as a start-of-the-year showcase for the gadgets that consumers will buy over the next 12 months. It started out as a venue for the TV and stereo industries. Later, PCs joined the party.
But over the past few years, TVs and PCs have declined in importance as portable gadgets have risen and the electronics show hasn’t kept pace. It’s not a major venue for phone and tablet offerings, though some new models will likely see the light of day there when the show floor opens Tuesday. The biggest trendsetter in mobile gadgets industry, Apple Inc., stays away as it shuns all events it doesn’t organize itself.
Apple rival Microsoft Corp. has also scaled back its patronage of the show. For the first time since 1999, Microsoft’s chief executive won’t be delivering the kickoff keynote. Qualcomm Inc. has taken over the podium. It’s an important maker of chips that go into cell phones, but not a household name.
None of this seems to matter much to the industry people who go to the show, which is set to be bigger than ever, at least in terms of floor space.
Gary Shapiro, president and chief executive of the organizing Consumer Electronics Association, expects attendance close to the 156,000 people who turned out last year. That’s pretty much at capacity for Las Vegas, which has about 150,000 hotel rooms.
And, the show doesn’t welcome gawkers: attendees are executives, purchasing managers, engineers, marketers, journalists and others with connections to the industry.
“We don’t want to be over 160,000,” Shapiro said before the start of the 2013 gathering. “We do everything we can not to be too crowded.”
Nor do the shifting winds of the technology industry seem to matter much to exhibitors. Though some big names are scaling back or missing, there are many smaller companies clamoring for booth space and a spot in the limelight for a few days. For example, while Apple doesn’t have an official presence at the show, there will be 500 companies displaying Apple accessories in the “iLounge Pavilion.”
Overall, the association sold a record 1.9 million
square feet of floor space (the equivalent of 33 football fields) for this year’s show.
Some of the themes that will be in evidence this week are expected to include ultra HDTVs that will have four times the resolution of HDTVs.
While this sounds extreme and unnecessary, many consumers have probably already been exposed to projections at this resolution because it’s used in digital movie theaters. Sony, LG, Westinghouse and others will be at the show with huge flat-panel TVs that deliver that experience at home — which can cost up to $20,000.
While the sets are eyecatching, they will likely be niche products for years to come, if they ever catch on. They have to be really big — more than 60 inches, measured diagonally — to make the extra resolution really count. Also, there’s no easy way to get movies in Ultra HDTV resolution.
“While there’s going to be a lot of buzz around Ultra HDTV, we really think what’s going to be relevant to consumers at the show is the continued evolution of 3-D TVs and Internet-connected TVs,” said Kumu Puri, senior executive with consulting firm Accenture’s Electronics & High-Tech group.
Unlike TVs, new phones are offered throughout the year, so the electronic’s show isn’t much of a bellwether for phone trends. But this year, reports point to several super-size smart phones, with screens bigger than 5 inches diagonally, making their debut at the show. These phones are so big they can be awkward to hold to the ear, but Samsung’s Galaxy Note series has shown that there’s a market for them. Some people call them “phablets” because they’re almost tablet-size.
Microsoft offered Windows 8 in October in an attempt to make the PC work more like a tablet. PC makers obliged, with a slew of machines that blend the boundaries. They have touch screens that twist, fold back or detach from the keyboard. None of these seems to be a standout hit so far, but more experiments are expected to be revealed at the show.
“All the PC manufacturers recognize that they have to do things differently,” Accenture’s Puri said.
The electronics show has been a showcase in recent years for technologies that free users from keyboards, mice and buttons.
Instead, they rely on cameras and other sophisticated sensors to track the user and interpret gestures and eye movements. Microsoft’s motion-tracking add-on for the Xbox 360 console, the Kinect, has introduced this type of technology to the living room. Startups and big TV makers are now looking to take it further.
PointGrab, an Israeli startup, will be showing off software that lets a regular laptop webcam interpret hand movements in the air in front of it.
Assaf Gad, head of marketing at PointGrab, said that the show is usually full of hopeful companies with speculative interaction technologies, “but this year, you can actually see real devices.”