Virtual CES 2021 Part 1

The Consumer Electronics Show was held virtually for the first time because of the pandemic. Normally we’re all in Las Vegas with extremely sore feet right about now. They made the decision mid-summer to cancel the show and it was a good decision. I’ve attended the event every year since 2003 and I’d never miss it. Therefore I was determined to get the most out of the virtual show and clearing my weekly calendar as much as possible.

I got up early on the first day of the virtual CES, to not find a whole lot that was accessible just yet. I could pick some exhibits I’d like to see, but I couldn’t access their content in any way. You can refine the search in various categories such as FinTech or Drones, and most categories are large with considerable overlap. I could find a few press announcement here and there, but nothing too exciting.

In 2021, it shows that there are 639 startups listed in the CES show directory of 1,968 companies. Almost an exact third of CES this year is made up of startups. The other categories are about the same as other years, with forty-two topics in all. The problem was that may topics overlap.

An example of the tile format used for Virtual CES 2021

Unless you know what the company does, it could be grouped in four different spaces, such as fintech and AI. The problem is, once you look at the company in one category, there is no way to delete it from the other. You have this massive list of corporate logos in tile form, none of which explain what they do. You must click, then opt out of literature, then go see what they do, and the site is slow. It would take half the time to walk by the booth. Not only in the online experience terrible, it’s extremely tedious.

With 1,968 companies, it’s impossible to know what’s interesting this year. It would take almost seventeen hours straight of just opening tiles to see each one without reading the content. There is no way to give you the CES summary I’ve produced over many years. I did manage to page through all 1,968 tiles, but I did not have time to open every one, with even less time to read the content.

A few points before I begin. This year, Apple, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Broadcom, were all absent from the directory, however there were some announcements from these companies. They decided to forego the tile experience. There were fewer announcements and it was harder to find specific new technologies without wading through a lot of irrelevant messaging.

The next big challenge was listening to the low production quality speakers who were all prerecorded prior to the show. Because they were all prerecorded, it also meant that all had a chance to tighten up their discussions and make them more meaningful. Instead, they were like any other dull Skype presentation that we all loathe. They were chocked full of empty platitudes, vague predictions, and meaningless talking points. Very few had new insights. One said, “5G is going to be so much faster and it will change everything.” Another said, “Technology is moving faster every day and so we have to make faster decisions.” Okay.

The quality of Microsoft Teams is about what I remember with Skype, something I refuse to use. Here are some video examples of how bad it was this year.

Isn’t this screen shot a thing of beauty? Audi did have some better screen moments, but not many.

Another high quality image from Teams, and they were all like this so you can’t blame the panelist.

Overall the speaker panels were mostly terrible, low quality experience, with sub-standard video quality and sometimes difficult audio. I don’t know what they were thinking. One of the worst was Audi. Their presentation overall was insincere, badly scripted, cringeworthy, with the worst trite bantering of them all. They looked like amateurs who got to spend a lot of money on a set. If I was the CEO of Audi and saw that presentation, I’d be mad as hell. Overall, it was the internet twenty years ago. Meanwhile, Best Buy, Sony, LG and Samsung all did a much better job. Verizon was terribly produced and it made their CEO look bad. Sony was by far the best. What made Sony especially stand out was the genuine delivery of all speakers with very clear objectives and an easy to follow roadmap. Good job Sony!

I found it particularly ironic, that CES, what’s supposed to lead the world of technology, could get all of this so wrong, when it should have been the easiest parts to get right. Especially given that each presentation group had an opportunity to rehearse and capture their points through multiple takes. They all could have done so much more to generate grippy meaningful content. This was CES phoning it in. Nobody seemed to have their heart in it. As a friend suggested, maybe they didn’t want it to be good. It almost felt that way.

Of course, every company was pandering. Talking about the latest political issues, reducing the time for relevant technology content. I don’t go to CES to hear about your stand on political matters, I go to learn about advancing technology. Even Gary Shapiro, President and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association couldn’t help himself and took political jabs, when he only had a short time to talk about technology’s future. It made the presentations especially tedious and cringeworthy.

In terms of overall show, I do give them some credit for putting something together in about six months. For that I move it from an F- to an F+, but it was no better than an F grade. I didn’t intend to write this much about the low quality event, but I have to say, I was very surprised and disappointed.

What’s Moving

On the technology side was a fair amount of talk about the new ATSC 3.0 television transmitters and what this means for TVs. Right now, there are 25 models produced to the new standard which gives you the ability to separate and boost voice volume, and soon you will have control over everything within the content, including frame rate. Seattle recently turned on the new standard for all local stations and it does look outstanding. Television technology will be moving towards the habits that people have, such as turning on closed caption because they can’t hear the dialog over the background noise. Now you will be able to adjust that.

On the Internet of Things or IoT, Verizon’s CEO said there are currently 14 billion devices interconnected and that it will grow to 55 billion by 2025. There was a lot of discussion about the lack of rural broadband connectivity and there is no excuse for it at all. We’ve all been paying for it for years. Think about what that means to rural households who don’t have it. I think this is a big opportunity for someone to solve. Of course, they were talking about the impact of 5G, and just think of it as a fatter pipe. It’s not much more than that. It does reduce device latency so it will allow for a range of new applications, but I can’t get that excited about it just yet.

More on Part 2-