CES

The Consumer Electronics Show, which sprawls a sensory overload across two million square feet (that’s 35 football fields) this week in Las Vegas, can be a useful forecaster of the kinds of stuff we’ll (someday) bring into our lives and homes.

It can also be an electronic petri dish of the spectacularly weird. Connected forks, to scold you when you’re eating too much, or too fast. Brainwave-sensing headbands, to tell you when you’re in a bad mood. Sensors, to monitor everything from sun exposure to canine/feline psychology.

Consider this a curated assembly of the kooky at this year’s CES — starting with the combo LED light bulb and JBL Bluetooth speaker, from Sengled. Each $60 bulb screws into an ordinary lamp, then plays stereo sound from two built-in, three-watt speakers. A companion app controls the streaming while regulating the lighting.

Too busy to work out? Maybe you need the “tiny gym in your pocket,” called “WellShell,” from TAO Wellness. It’s a plastic, squeezable thing, about the size of a (computer) mouse, but more swoopy. Its purpose: To give you an isometric workout, no matter where you are. (A marketing video shows a woman on a plane, squeezing the thing with both hands, as it blurts out “Flex! Flex! Flex!”)

Inside each WellShell: A pressure sensor, accelerometer, heart rate sensor, GPS tracker, and gyroscope. No pricing yet; a tag of between $200-$300 is expected.

Yoo hoo, runners: Are your socks smart enough? New from Sensoria (tagline: “the garment is the computer!”), the socks use “novel textile sensors” to detect activity type and impact force. Data transmits through a “featherweight, detachable anklet,” over BlueTooth, to a companion app.

To trick out your smooth moves, Austin Powers-style, there’s the $270 Logbar ring. Slip it on, learn a few gestures, boom! The (decidedly chunky) ring turns on the TV, checks the weather, turns on the lights, uploads a photo, and so on. Great if you don’t mind looking like you’re plucking imaginary flies out of the air. One catch: The app has to be on and active for the ring to work.

Speaking of chunky: New this year is a big, plastic, waterproof bracelet, called “Child Angel.” With its built-in GPS, your kids will never lose you again!

Tired of scraping the gunk off your grill? This one’s for you: The Grillbot. Like a Roomba, for your grill! Each 30 minute cleaning cycle uses three “powerful electric motors” to de-gunk your BBQ. Comes in four colors for $130.

Lastly: H+ Technologies calls its invention “Magic Box.” We call it holographic TV, baby! Perfect for a CES. Invented by Masters graduates of the Centre for Digital Media, the Magic Box converts 2D content into holographic 3D, displayed inside the box. Bonus: You can use it to charge your phone and tablet, too.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

For those of us headed to the annual Consumer Electronics Show, which happens a scant four days after the New Year, the holiday season necessarily includes shaking the network to get a deeper look at what’s planned.

You won’t be surprised at the outlook, but here goes.

First: UltraHD/4K is the new 3D, which had been the new HD, before the marketplace thud that hastened it out the door. The refrain this year, albeit not necessarily from the CE side: There’s more to better pictures and sound than “just” the television set.

This year, watch for UHD lingo studded with impressively nerdy terms like “high dynamic range,”  “color gamut,” and “bit interleave depth.”

All explain additional ways in which innovation is happening throughout the rest of the video ecosystem — think cameras, production gear, and the technologies of storytelling. If you go, you’ll see it in the way colors look. Blacks look downright velvety, reds look royal, greens mossy. The picture overall is brighter. Much brighter.

(Talk to any hardcore video engineer — HDR and what’s happening with color and brightness is as “wow” as when standard definition video went high def.)

Second: Wearables, coupled with a new-ish term — “cognitive computing” — described as “mobile devices that anticipate your actions based on who you are, who you’re with, and make decisions for you.” (Great…)

While it’s rare that the dazzle and pop of CES fare is directly relevant to this industry, wearables and cognitive computing do open a plausible stream of thought: What decisions could be made for us, that improve our media-centric life?

Note that it’s likely we’ll see more “smart clothing” this year. Already we’ve seen a blazer, designed for tourists in New York and Paris, and equipped with LED lights on the sleeves, and buzzers in the shoulder pads. The thinking: Stop looking at the blue dot on the screen! Your right arm will blink and buzz when you need to turn right.

Again. CES is CES.

Third: Smart homes, smart cars, driverless cars, smart things — sensors will sustain in show floor glitz. Entire pavilions will be cordoned off to showcase the Internet of Things, always a source of weird and interesting gadgetry, but rarely directly relevant to whatever it is we’re calling the cable industry these days.

Regardless, there’s nothing quite like the Consumer Electronics Show. This will be my 15^th consecutive year as (tres dorky) guide for CTAM’s tours, and while I generally dread it on the front end, I’m always glad about how it went, it at the end.

We’ll keep the highlights coming.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

LAS VEGAS — At this writing, my feet have logged three days and 15.2 miles of walking the 1.8 million square feet of 2014 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and there’s still two days of Show to go. Here’s the bigger takeaways so far.

1: This is the year we all were made acutely aware of how dumb our homes are. And everything in them. It is Sensor City at CES this year, with everything from connected toothbrushes (perhaps to go with last year’s connected forks?) to connected washing machines (which will send you a text message if you forget to move a load to the dryer.)

People call this “the Internet of Things,” of course, and “the Internet of Everything.”

A common refrain, during demos: “And after you pair your (name of dumb thing) to your house, you can (make your house / your thing smart.)” Ask the oven what it’s doing. Ask the dishwasher. The garage door. It goes on and on and on.

2: If it doesn’t come with a sensor, it comes with a camera. We saw a small rubber ball outfitted with six tiny cameras (for law enforcement to throw or roll into a room, to get a better look before entering.) Cameras that clip onto the bathing suit, to stream live video directly to Facebook (great.)

3. Health and fitness gadgets, which go under the category of “wearable technology,” took up 25,000 square feet of exhibit space this year, and are further proof that CES is a hypochondriac’s paradise. Alongside the now-saturated wearable pedometer marketplace, there were wristbands that measure the amount of sun your skin is receiving, and gadgets that collect 5,000 data points from your body — every hour.

There was even a fitness collar for your dog, to track its breathing and heart rate and so on. (A companion app ties to veterinarians and health records.)

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention 4K television, which also goes by UltraHD. It was (predictably) everywhere, and sure, it’s gorgeous. It’s also still way ahead of the rest of the television ecosystem, from the cameras that can film in 4K, to the HDMI connector on the set itself — and everything in between.

I’ll stick with a 2013 observation about 4K: If it’s of interest to you, find somewhere else for the bookcase, or whatever else is currently occupying your largest wall.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichanel News.

Usually, the International CES serves up at least a few new buzzwords – last year, Samsung coined the “phablet,” to describe a device that’s half phone, half tablet. The “superphone” entered the tech lexicon, briefly, but never really stuck. Apparently it’s better to be “smart” than “super.”

This year, only one new term popped out of CES — but there’s plenty venturing out from the world of Wi-Fi. This week’s translation is a round-up of weird, overworked, and new tech lingo.

The new one from CES: “Ten-finger touch,” to describe large-scale tablets upon which you can use all 10 digits. (Not sure what happens if an 11^th finger ventures onto the screen.)

At CES, “ten finger touch” talk involved tablets the size of a coffee table.

The latest in overworked lingo: “Curation.” This one seems to show up as a classier twist on “aggregation.” Think of it in terms of news websites (industrial and mainstream), which populate themselves with summaries of stories researched and written by other news sites — often without attribution.

We used to call this plagiarism. Now, it’s “curated content.”

The new WiFi lingo: “SON,” which has nothing to do with male offspring (although it’s pronounced as such), and everything to do with “self organizing networks.” (Some also call them “self-optimizing networks.”)

Here’s why at some point we’ll need SONs: Because WiFi spectrum is largely unlicensed, meaning unmanaged, and more and more of our dumb stuff will want to jump onto it, to get smart.

SON is part of  “the Internet of Things,” which affixes sensors to our stuff, thus making it “smart.” At CES, the “Internet of Things”  showed up big time at the Zigbee Alliance, which serves the industry segment making low-power, low-cost radios (“the Clapper” is an early example; most of today’s home security systems use Zigbee.)

One Zigbee participant (and heavily Kickstarter-funded) outfit, “Smart Things,” characterized today’s times as the third phase of the Internet. Phase one was knowledge/search. Phase two was social. Now, we’re entering the physical Internet, which controls our formerly dumb stuff.

But back to “SON,” a cousin of machine-to-machine (“M2M”) computing and near field communications (“NFC”). It exists to coordinate between multiple radios, so that, say, your Skype call doesn’t get stepped on by your smart house. Because it turns out that Zigbee-based gear, WiFi, and lots of other stuff runs in the 2.4 GHz range. SON keeps WiFi’s many occupants clear of each other.

For me, any mention of “self organizing” is alluring. Like maybe a physical Internet with sensors to self-organize closets and junk drawers. That’d be good.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

The Consumer Electronics Show is in full swing at this writing, and as a person who arrives early and leaves late, here’s a few observations.

1. It’s a hypochondriac’s paradise! A wide corridor in the South Hall pulsed with electronic tools for a thinner, fitter world. The digital pedometer wars are on, for starters, and as someone addicted to 10,000 steps/day (year four!), it got my attention. (Especially because my new Nike Fuelband conveniently broke on the first day of the show.)

One vendor – HapiLabs (where the “hapi” is pronounced like the emotion) staved off crowds seeking a peek at its “smart fork.” It vibrates if you eat too quickly. Yes there’s a companion app for your smartphone….

2. Everyone, even the people who make the tumbler locks on your doors, wants to secure and automate your home. It’s another manifestation of advanced fragmentation: The alarm guys are here with home automation mechanisms, as are the tumbler lock guys, and the in-home wiring guys. And the cable guys, for that matter.

3. “The Internet of Things” is alive and well at CES. By now you’ve perhaps given some thought to how many things (computers, tablets, phones) in your life need an Internet connection. Consensus estimation is 10, per household, by 2015; most hard-core tech-enthusiasts are easily in the 30s right now.

4. And largely, that’s before factoring in things that will make use of things like Pandora, or Spotify – your smart TV, your lights, your fridge. Whirlpool demonstrated a kitchen suite with high-end speakers for Internet and/or local audio streaming; Samsung showed a TV with a screen with sound and a browser (think epicurious.com on a stationary screen, rather than perching the laptop on the counter.)

One new vendor – “Smart Things” – aims to use the protocols of the Zigbee Alliance to make our dumb things (lights, thermostats, garage doors, windows) smart.

Probably the big standout, though, was the next chapter in HD — “Ultra HD,” the re-brand of “4K” — there are 8K and 16K versions lined up behind it. If you remember the first you saw HDTV, and thought “wow, this is better than my eyes can see” – Ultra HD is better than that. Stunning visuals.

It’s a long way off, though, much to the chagrin of the CE vendors, who seek the next HD slam dunk. Why: Content doesn’t yet exist that’s high enough in resolution to exercise the capabilities of the $20,000 screens. Forget about “down-rez” (down-sizing resolution) issues. With Ultra-HD, “up-rez” tends to pop up in conversations – how to add bits to existing, Blu-Ray-grade content, to make it rich enough for the screens. And: Cameras and editing gear doesn’t yet exist; the bandwidth to carry it is formidable; it’s too big for HDMI cables … and that’s the short list.

Back to the floor…

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

It happens about every decade, and the third one is almost upon us: A new standard for video compression, bound to make video shipping better.

It’s called “HEVC,” for “High Efficiency Video Coding.” You’ll see it demo into the industrial mainstream at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show, in January, and into your handhelds and TVs a year hence from that.

The skinny (heh): Another doubling of how much video can be stuffed into the same space as what’s stuffable using today’s best compression techniques. Or, it’s a way to send the same stream with more bits. More bits, better quality.

HEVC improves upon H.264 (also known as “AVC” and “MPEG-4”), which improved on MPEG-2, the granddaddy of digital video compression, dating back to the earliest digital set-top boxes (circa 1995.)

With each new compression chapter, efficiency roughly doubled: HEVC is 2x better than H.264/MPEG-4; H.264 is 2x better than MPEG-2. It follows that HEVC is 4x better than what’s inside millions of already-fielded digital set-tops.

Who benefits most: Mobile carriers, already vexed with trying to keep up with how much video we’re shipping to each other from our camera-bejeweled handhelds.

Another potential beneficiary: Over-the-top video providers (think Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc.), which will likely opt for the “more bits” stance. Capacity? Eh! To them, bandwidth is free. Why bother with conservation?

No reason the home team (multichannel video providers) can’t look happily upon HEVC, too. With the pursuit of “all-IP” (Internet Protocol) networks comes the ability to harness the goods of that world. HEVC isn’t by definition an “IP thing,” but it’ll play sooner and with more gusto on the IP side of the plant.

What’s different between HEVC and H.264/MPEG-4: Nothing huge. Both use the same core techniques. (Advanced class: Block-based motion compensation, entropy coding, predictive coding, quantization into i-frames, b-frames and p-frames.)

More, HEVC makes existing compression ingredients more flexible. Recall that compression is all about finding and removing redundancies in pictures. In H.264, motion blocks were fixed; in HEVC, they’re variably-sized.

Instead of encoding the entire yellow wall, frame to frame, for instance, HEVC can “mark” it for reconstitution as such on the end screen (“yellow wall here,” in a gross oversimplification.)

The tradeoff is computational intensity – up 35-50% — particularly on the decode end: TVs, handhelds. But, computational complexity is symbiotic with Moore’s Law. So, processors are already 10x stronger than they were when MPEG-4/H.264 came out, 10-ish years ago.

At last month’s IBC, encoder maker Elemental Technologies showed attendees its HEVC work in two ways. One demo showed a 1080p HD stream compressed to 5.2 Mbps — which “weighs” about 8 Mbps, when compressed with H.264. Another showed side-by-side 1080P streams, HEVC and H.264, both compressed to 5.2 Mbps. The point: To show off the additional picture quality afforded by HEVC in the same amount of bandwidth.

Pretty nifty, by all accounts so far.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

Bob Zitter, Chief Technology Officer for HBO, spoke with me (with Times Square in the background, for real!) about how the premium network views the market for mobile video.This segment aired at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show.

Video courtesy The Cable Channel.

Prior to the 2005 Consumer Electronics Show, I visited CableLabs to discuss the intersections between CE devices and cable services. In this second segment, VP of Advanced Platforms and Services Don Dulchinos discusses the need to work with more manufacturers; Jenifer Cistola talks about “Go2Broadband.”

Video courtesy The Cable Channel.

Prior to the 2005 International Consumer Electronics Show, I visited CableLabs to speak with CEO Dick Green and CTO Ralph Brown about why CES is a hot ticket for consumer-minded cable operators.

Video courtesy The Cable Channel.