Consumers win – DVD loses
13 January 2008
Did the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) tell us anything? Did it reveal the ‘killer app’ that was going to show the electronics industry the way forward for the next decade? Well it might have done – but it passed me by if it did.
My problem was one of information overload. I decided to follow the advice of Anand Sethi, our Indian correspondent (see Carbon Costs of Trade Shows ), and minimise my carbon footprint by following the show through the internet. On the first day (last Monday) my ‘virtual press office’ had been filled with over 700 items of information – most of which appear to boast a major technological breakthrough in their headline. I cannot begin to imagine how exciting it may have been had I read every message throughout! The information stream continued unabated throughout the week.
I did in fact go through the announcements that caught my eye and it sounded like a pretty impressive array of kit. But with around 2700 exhibiting companies launching an estimated 20,000 new products, there was no way I could come up with a considered review of what it says about industry. I imagine the 130,000 or so visitors to CES probably felt the same way. Most importantly, EMTWorldWide is a manufacturing electronics web site and to try to follow every trend in every market sector would be impossible.
I did have a look through the American CNET web site (www.cnet.com), a veritable playground for geeks and gadgets, for which the consumer electronics market is meat and drink. Its coverage of the CES show far outstrips anything that is appropriate for this site and gives good, accessible information about new products. It made its product of the show the Philips Eco TV – a high-definition LCD TV that features reduced power consumption. I will not list the other category winners, but there were mobile phones, MP3 players and more that had a very high ‘covetability’ factor.
But beyond the obvious trend for every device to do as many functions as possible, while making it as easy as possible for humans to do as little as possible (in terms of actually moving), was there anything else to emerge from CES?
Well for those of us of a ‘certain age’ there was an unsatisfactory whirr of history repeating itself. I am, of course, referring to the colossal battle for supremacy in high definition video formats. And while this is superficially comparable to the ‘video war’ between Betamax and VHS in the 70s, there continues to be a frustrating lack of clarity as to who will win the day.
From a technical point of view there doesn’t seem to be much in it - not that that was the deciding factor in the video wars. As I understandit, Sony’s Betamax was probably the better product, but history is written by the victors!
There seems to be no clear winner from a technology point of view between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, although the announcement at CES that Warner was going to exclusively back the latter from next year was a huge boost for Blu-Ray.
However, should we, as the electronics manufacturing community, really care? Won’t the same quantities be manufactured irrespective of the format? Surely the only losers would be individual manufacturers (who will manufacture the appropriate format anyway), not the industry as a whole?
I’m not sure that this is the case. I think there is a very real danger that the market may not hang around to find out who wins. There is a parallel here with music. Until a couple of years ago I had not downloaded a single song to my PC! I am a bit of a late adopter – I still like magazines and newspapers, for example, as well as an actual CD. But then I bought an iPod and that all changed. While you could argue that the reduced quantity of CD players has been more than replaced by the increased number of MP3 players (and phones etc with music playing ability as mentioned above), I don’t think that this may be so true in the video market.
In fact, if download speeds were improved, online back catalogues expanded and PC to TV connectivity enhanced (if we need a stand-alone TV at all in the future!), then there is an argument that a separate video player of any kind will be surplus to requirements. Consequently, the longer the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray debate continues, the less relevant the outcome is likely to be.
In the meantime, in my role as late adopter, I will sit on the fence and buy neither player until I know which is going to be the best to buy. With the majority of people having either the same attitude (or budget), the loser, both in the short and long term, is going to be the manufacturers.
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