Now that the Consumer Electronics Show mania has begun (27 days and counting…), it’s worth a brief look back to eleven months ago and CES 2007: The Headlines, The Celebrities, The (Motorola) Products.
The Headlines… Nearly a Year Later
It’s All About the TV/PC – Dan Costa at PC Magazine wrote about bridging the gap from the PC to the TV and the new category of media extenders designed to do the job. Certainly we’ve had no shortage of media extender products come to market this year, but ironically (and not uncommonly) Costa focused most of his attention on the Apple TV. “The biggest news at CES isn’t even on the convention floor.” Where’s Apple TV today? According to a Forrester analyst, sales have fallen short of projections and Apple should be focusing efforts on winning back NBC shows to iTunes, which disappeared earlier this month.
LG Debuts a Combination Blu-Ray and HD DVD Player – David Katzmaier (and many others) wrote about the launch of the LG DVD player supporting both Blu-Ray and HD DVD high-def formats. The second generation of the product came out recently, and apparently there’s enough of a market that Samsung is going to introduce its own player next month (at CES?). The format war continues. Meanwhile, cable and telecom operators have gotten into the HD VOD game this year. Hmm. No format worries there.
The Celebrities
In the Motorola booth alone…
Carson Palmer. Didn’t have anything for him to autograph, but at least I had my camera!
That’s MC Hammer on the left… with a cigar.
Wow! It’s none other than Dan Moloney! He now presides over the whole of Motorola Home and Networks Mobility.
The (Motorola) Products
Set-tops were front and center in the Motorola booth and elsewhere. Below is a pic of the CableCARD “host” set-tops launched last year (huge number of deployments since then) followed by a photo of a Motorola U-verse set-top in the AT&T booth.
Oh, and there were a few mobile devices on display too. 
[...] dropping in on the blog, expanded content and (hopefully) some video where relevant. I’ll also be blogging CES again this [...]
[...] year’s CES felt very different from years past in the Motorola booth. There were no celebrities, no video phones, no candy-colored modems; there was significantly less bling. For all that, the [...]