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A Tale of Two Satellite Press Conferences, part 2

Posted on January 13, 2007 by Jeremy Toeman

Continuing from part 1…

DirecTV
From walking in it appeared that the DirecTV conference was going to be a bit of a rehash of Echostar, but once the lights dimmed, the difference was substantial. First of all, the presentation included… video. Yup, video – from a media company – what a surprise! I was also impressed that the company brought a team of execs, and a couple of guest stars!

The presentation from Chase Carey (President/CEO) began with a recap of 2006, then went on to discuss the year ahead. The focus will be on Sports, HD, and VOD, and will include new content and services to support the vision. Chase then professed the company’s HDTV leadership position.

Steven Roberts (VP of Games and Strategic Initiatives) came on to present DirecTV’s new Championship Gaming Series, which he described as a “sports league” for gaming. The league will debut later this year, and includes a draft, commissioner, and salaried players. They showed a promo video which I felt was a really exciting vision for gaming. This is definitely something I’d have applied for as a teenager, and I hope “the kids today” take advantage of the opportunity. Fatal1ty also appeared, as he’s under an exclusive contract with DirecTV. I also got a brief interview with him which I’ll post later.

Next up, Eric Shanks (EVP for Entertainment) took the stage to discuss a few new technologies and services. The theme of “being connected” is key, with their Viiv-enabled DVR as their first foray into a connected, digital home. Eric also showcased the upcoming DirecTV-on-demand (launching in Q1), which allows subscribers to view a whole new lineup of on-demand programming. Broadcasters will have the ability to create their own styles and themed “pages” for users.

Eric mentioned consumers’ frustrations with receiving announcements (for new channels, programming, features, etc) from DirecTV and how they are addressing it with a new feature called GMessages (the G is for Guide). In the demo, the program guide has new lines with ~~ads~~ announcements from DTV or broadcasters. These ~~ads~~ announcements can also include interactive features (e.g. “record this” or, more appropriately “buy now”). I don’t know about how many customers are complaining on this topic, but I’d recommend this article at PVRWire on some quite major complaints.

Next, Eric introduced TV veteran Rick Rosner as the pioneer/inventor of a new product coming soon from DirecTV called Sat+Go. Now I have the pleasure of having met Rick while I was working at Sling Media, as he was a big Slingbox owner and helped spread the word to Hollywood. Rick’s a great guy and a visionary, and while he loves his Slingbox, he really wanted to come up with a way to watch DirecTV without any connection, whether he’s in the middle of the desert or out camping somewhere. Thus, Sat+Go was born (read more from the NY Times). Congrats to Rick, couldn’t happen to a nicer guy!

Next up from Eric was a preview of the Nascar Hot Pass, a DirecTV exclusive debuting next month. For each race, the DTV/Nascar team will pick 5 racers and give them dedicated channels during the race. It adds 30 new cameras and 10 announcers per race! I’m not much of a Nascar fan myself, but it sounds like a great service to Nascar fans.

During Q&A, I decided to pop in a question myself, wanting to find out where DTV sees Internet/user-generated content (read: YouTube) fits in. DirecTV believes the trend is toward HDTV, and most UGC doesn’t look good (read: it looks very bad) on HD displays. That said, they acknowledge the growth and are looking into something down the road with “Web players.” My hunch is they’ve gone into it pretty far, as they even mentioned a possible implementation where Web videos could have a “send to my DVR” button added to the screen. This was actually my first time hearing a company like this one admit there is a benefit to working with Web services (as opposed to the PR rep at Moxi/Digeo who felt that its not the right target market and a bit too niche). I’m impressed!

The final interesting comment came as a reporter from a HD publication asked about 1080p support. DirecTV has not committed to 1080p, and their CTO rose to state that they weren’t making any commitments yet. As the reporter pushed on the question, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that they weren’t budging yet, and weren’t convinced on the benefits of the format. This is a sentiment I completely agree with, and will discuss in the future – don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-1080p, I just think there’s a lot of FUD on the topic.

Powerpoint slides, screenshots, and pictures from the event are below:

In Conclusion
I have decided to create an arbitrary scoring system to pronounce one of the two companies the First Ever Winner of the CES 2007 Battle of the Satellite Company Press Conferences…

DirecTV takes a gamble on broadcasting quite a few hours of video game competition. 1 point.
Both companies declare themselves “HD leaders”. 0 points.
DirecTV dedicates 5 new channels for car racing. Net gain of 0 points.
Echostar pledges no rate hikes and widens the channel lineups. 3 points.
DirecTV throws advertising into the program guide. -1 point.
Echostar gives the customer control with USB support. 1 point.
DirecTV tries a novel approach of letting someone outside their company propose a product and actually brings it to market. 1 point.
Echostar has Sling Media investment (worth 1 point) but no other mention of any Internet-based content or services (minus 2 points).
DirecTV addresses the Connected Home as well as Internet content services. 2 out of a 5 total point pool for the topic.

Initial score: Echostar 3, DirecTV 3. Holy cow, a tie. Hmm.. I need a tiebreaker. OK, how about:

DirecTV wins it by showing more than 0 seconds of video during their presentation.

A Tale of Two Satellite Press Conferences, part 1

Posted on January 12, 2007 by Jeremy Toeman

While Sunday was the official Press Day at CES, Monday (and beyond) still offered a few press conferences. I decided to go to both the EchoStar (DISH Network) and DirecTV ones, which were conveniently back-to-back and in neighboring rooms. It was quite interesting to see the complete contrast in styles between both presentations.

Echostar/DISH Network
Echostar’s conference started with some corporate background and statistics (more than 13 million subscribers!), then moved on to discuss the focus for 2007. The motto was “it’s about time” and some of the key points included: a focus on DVR, no change to consumer pricing, and their HDTV leadership position.

Mark Jackson (president, Echostar technologies corporation – not the NBA player) took the podium to go into some details about new products, services, and technologies. New receivers are coming for 2007, many of which have the 2-room functionality. Mark stressed the importance of this both to consumers as well as to the installation costs.

The flagship new unit is the VIP622 HD receiver, coming to market in Q2, 2007. The unit sports:

500GB hard drive (roughly 500 hours of standard def recording, and somewhere between 40-65 hours of HDTV recording)
Support for VC-1 (Windows Media Video HD)
External USB HDD support! This was my favorite thing to hear, as it shows the embracement of empowering the consumer to make some of their own decisions. They’ve tested the system with most major USB drives, and it is their stated goal to support as many as possible. The sole limitation of the system is that content recorded on a given receiver can only be played back on the same receiver, so if you have another room or a vacation home, you can’t move the hard drive around.

Mark also mentioned a few strategic relationships, including AT&T Homezone (which they’d apparently like to replace), Sling Media (they are an investor), and Archos (whom they basically own). Afterwards, Charlie Ergen joined to answer Q&A.

Overall it was a fairly dry conference, without too much novelty or technology. Perfect for the financial community, but a little on the dull side for the rest of us. All their slides are ~~belong to us~~ below:

Part 2 is here.

Thoughts on Consumer Robotics

Posted on January 12, 2007 by Jeremy Toeman

After some impressive demos by iRobot and WowWee, Ron asks JT about what’s in store for bringing robots into the home in 2007.

disclaimer: I am doing some consulting work for WowWee, so I have seen some “behind-the-scenes” magic over there.

Video: What's coming in 07?

Posted on January 12, 2007 by Jeremy Toeman

Short clip with JT musing on the gadgetry of 2007. As Michael Gartenberg said last week, lots of evolution, not much of a revolution.

CES2007: JT in the AM

Posted on January 12, 2007 by Jeremy Toeman

Short video we shot on the morning of CES day 2. In this one I discuss:

Some thoughts on how the CES booths are planned
Initial reaction to seeing pictures of the iPhone

Where's LD@CES?

Posted on January 11, 2007 by Jeremy Toeman

After 5 exhausting days we’re back in San Francisco, with buckets full of content to upload. Originally the plan was to do regular updates from the road, but the grand sum of time spent in front of the laptop was less than an hour, all week! Every day was totally full of press conferences, booth visits and demos, interviews, corporate parties, keynotes, and other industry functions (I never even made it to the Bloghaus!). It was both very fun and very draining at the same time.

I’ll start posting content tomorrow, will probably go for up to another week before it’s all online. The “LD Exclusive” interviews with people such as Fatal1ty (he’s a really really really good gamer) and Peter Rojas/Ryan Block (while we debated it at length, I finally conceded that up to this point their show coverage was slightly more in-depth than mine) were a lot of fun!

33 Year-Old Virgin

Posted on January 8, 2007 by ron

It’s the end of my first day of my first ever CES and I’m left, well, “whelmed.” Our friend Rob Goldberg prepared me by saying, “You’ve never been? Prepare to be both under-whelmed and overwhelmed.” He was right and I’m left totally “whelmed.”

I met up with Jeremy at the Venetian at 10:00AM on Sunday when he returned from the Netgear announcements and we spent the day cruising the press conferences and basically securing decent seats for the Bill Gates keynote.

The sheer scale of CES is overwhelming. For those that haven’t been, there are over 140,000 attendees from around the world and 2700 presenters. Because of the size, this means that the presentations, parties and events are spread around the strip. You have to be ready to do a ton of walking. I wanted to be Jobe from AD. I’m glad I read Jeremy’s CES tips, because they don’t allow Segways on the Ceaser’s people-mover.

So, I’m pretty sure I spent most of yesterday walking to or from somewhere, but can’t really remember much of value, including the Gates keynote, from these places. Hanging with Dave Winer, seeing Bill Gates were highlights as well as the HP party and running into Bob Morgan at Shozu. Getting into the Bill Gates conference meant dealing with the chaos, that could have been avoided by the CEA team, of picking up your press tickets in a mad scramble around 3:00. Standing in a separate line at 5:00. To go upstairs and stand in another line at 5:30. People go mad for this and I’m not sure I totally get it. After all the waiting and walking, you get to see Microsoft present OS X. Except for the gaming stuff, nothing really seemed fresh or interesting.

After the keynote, we went to Pepcom and HP Pure party. Again, flat screens a little wider; cameras a little smaller, and meat on stick. Okay. Whelmed again. Oo

And then, if Lorie’s reading this, we went right to bed at 11:00 so we could be up bright and early for the floor’s opening and today’s press conferences. ‘Cause that’s what you do in Vegas, right?

I’m looking forward to cruising the floor and will be demo’ing Canon’s new A640 10 mega-pixel camera. Look for the review coming soon.

Day 1: Off to the show (south/central halls)

Posted on January 8, 2007 by Jeremy Toeman

Haven’t had a chance to put up my Bill Gates keynote coverage, but everybody else has so far, so I trust you’ve found it by now. I was hanging with Ron Hirson, who is covering the show with me, and Dave Winer, who hasn’t been to CES in quite a few years. Had some very interesting conversations which I’ll unfortunately have to delay posting about for a little while. I’m in a rush because I want to see my friend Rick Rosner’s latest achievement at the 10am DirecTV press conference.

One of the hardest things about blogging at CES is making the time for the posts. I have content all ready to go, but yet I want to go consume and generate even more! I’ve decided to bring my laptop, ick, just to try to get a post or two in during the day. Yes, dear reader, 6 pounds (including charger) on my back all day just for you. If it doesn’t work, I most definitely will not repeat tomorrow.

BTW, in addition to Engadget’s great coverage, this “river of CES news” from podtech is another good way to get info on the show in near-real-time.

ps – I won’t have email access during the day, so if you want to find me, give a call.

Netgear knocks it out of the park at CES

Posted on January 7, 2007 by Jeremy Toeman

Opening disclosure: I am working on a consulting project with Netgear, but that work is unrelated to my blogging about them. I was invited to their press conference and chose to attend and got to see three new products that I was previously unaware of. This blog post is because I am genuinely amazed with a product of theirs.

Now, onto the story. Netgear had a press conference this morning and unveiled three new products which I will list and describe in ascending order of excitement and interestingness. Before the demos, Debbie Williams (Netgear’s Chief Marketing Officer) gave a brief “state of the union” for the company. Basically: 10 years old, market cap of $883M, products sold in >16K retailers, and they introduced 50 new products in 2006 (methinks about 42 of them were routers, but I guess it counts anyway, right?). She then went on to discuss how 2006 was the year of building the home network for the digital lifestyle (love that term, but I think I may have heard it before), and 2007 is the year of delivering the experience. She then introduced Vivek Pathela, Netgear’s VP of Product Marketing to do the demos (again, listed here in my order, not theirs):

Storage Central Turbo. This updates 2005’s Storage Central device by adding the capacity to expand to multiple terabytes of data as well as gigabit Ethernet. If you aren’t paying attention to the bits and bytes, it means it can store and stream HD movies around your house. This is a fairly evolutionary/logical enhancement to the product line. The MSRP is $249 (with no included hard drives, which makes sense since it’s so much cheaper for you to buy your own anyway) and the product should ship “early” this year. More pics:
Dual-Mode Cordless Phone with Skype. Now we’re seeing some interesting convergence happen. Quite a few companies introduced Skype or VoIP phones in 2006, some worked well, some didn’t. Netgear seems to have added a clever twist by incorporating a standard telephone in the same handset (aka Plain Old Telephone Service, or POTS). This is a very smart combination, as it lets a consumer have just a single home phone that can work with both Skype and POTS systems. Also, you can get multiple handsets all working with the same base station (although an audience member asked a great question: can more than one handset make a simultaneous POTS call? which stumped the Netgear team – I sure hope it’s a yes). The demo went great as Vivek called Patrick Lo, Netgear’s CEO, and had a quick live call with near-excellent audio quality. MSRP $199, available now (on Amazon)!
EVA8000 Digital Entertainer HD. Oh my is this one interesting. It’s a, well, “box” that hooks up to your TV and your home network connection. It then streams your music, photos, and videos from any PC or networked storage device (NAS) to your TV. It also streams from YouTube (they demoed a classic Diet Coke/Mentos video, which about 90% of the audience reacted as if they’d never seen it before – wow). It also works in high definition (up to 1080p resolution), including full upscaling/downscaling of video. It supports almost every video codec, including MPEG-4 HD, WMV HD, DivX, MPEG-2, H.264, etc etc. It also streams iTunes (including protected content if from a Windows PC, sorry Mac folks). It also has USB to locally connect a flash drive or an iPod. It also supports multiple units so you can start a video in one room, then finish it in another. It also has full PVR (TiVo-like) capabilities. And from the demo, it looks like it works very well! As a guy who has spent about 8 years designing award-winning devices just like these, I am quite impressed. Quite! MSRP $349, available early 2007.

I’ve seen a bit of other coverage already of the conference. MacUser compares it against iTV and calls the UI “uninspired” which is a fair point, but I think making comparisons against a product that’s not really been “announced” yet isn’t quite appropriate. Also, I disagree that Apple will beat the $349 price point, as I think they’d rather rip into their loyal customer base who are more willing to overpay for the Apple brand. More coverage from Ed Kohler, Eric Savitz at Barron’s, Gadgetell, and SciFi.com, but for very extensive details, here’s the Engadget transcript. I also bumped into Dave Zatz (with Sakshi Goel of Netgear), Netgear’s resident CES blogger.

So there’s my front-runner for most interesting new product of CES: the Netgear Digital Entertainer HD. We’ll see how the rest of the show pans out! More Netgear conference pics below and the whole CES collection is here.

CES day -1: CES Unveiled

Posted on January 7, 2007 by Jeremy Toeman

It’s technically day -1 since the show starts Monday, which of course makes tomorrow day 0. This might seem a bit odd right now, but if I start with day 1 now, my monday posts will reference day 3, and that’ll be even weirder.

I caught up with Steven Jones and Ron Repking, from Capable Networks (the company whose technology powers my old haunting grounds at SlingCommunity.com). Ron was sporting his new Canon HV10 high definition (1080i widescreen) video camera. I like to tease Ron (and Jones) a bit from time to time about their gadgetry, but I must say, I was jealous! Way to go Ron!

Next up I went to pick up my badge, and walked around the Sands Expo center a bit. It’s nice and peaceful. For now…

CES Unveiled is basically a “pre-show” where several dozen vendors had small tables set up with their wares and demonstrations. The nice part about events like this (and Showstoppers, which is coming Monday night) is that the playing field is even. No huge booths. No light shows. No overwhelming dance routines. Just a table, 3 people, and your products. I always enjoyed these events from behind the table, but it was great to spend the evening roaming the floor. I didn’t take a ridiculous number of photos, since I figured (correctly) the guys at Engadget would have the coverage nailed.

There weren’t too many new products floating around CES Unveiled this year, which was a bit of a disappointment as the event is often such a good showcase. Looks like some companies are waiting until tomorrow’s Digital Experience or Monday’s Showstoppers before unveiling their kimonos. From the buzz around the floor, I’d have to say WowWee’s Elvis was probably the most warmly received product by the attendees. I think it’s possibly a huge winner actually, it’s like a Big Mouth Billy Bass 2.0, only it features Elvis, a beloved icon, as opposed to, well, a fish. For proper disclosure, I will say I am working on a project with WowWee, although it’s completely unrelated to all animatronic singing country stars.

I personally liked LG’s new flip phone, although it’s a bit long, and runs Brew operating system, which completely limits it to Verizon’s service. Not a problem for me, but I don’t see how it can be massively successful with a single carrier. Hopefully they’ll do well with it, being a Verizon customer often means I’m out in the cold for new phones!

One trend that I think will continue to grow in 2007 is digital picture frames. At least 3 vendors were showing them at Unveiled, and I suspect there’ll be many more on the floor. According to one demonstrator, analysts predict as many as 5 million units will ship in ’07. Sounds a bit high, but I really like the concept. To me, the big winner would be a “FlickrFrame” that I could send to someone else (like my parents or grandparents) and designate shared pictures on my Flickr account that automatically appear on the frame. That’s the big winner in my book.

I listened to some HD Radio (wow), checked out the latest Shure headphones (review coming, but wow again), and took a peek at the new SideShow laptop from ASUS. I think someone needs to make a laptop with a full second screen, specifically used by people who do a lot of presentations. Throw in a tablet too, and I believe it’s a winner.

I also saw some old and new friends at the show, including Gary Krakow, Ross Rubin, Dave Graveline, Ed Kohler, and… Madonna. Okay, okay, not really, but not bad either!

Some more fun highlights are below, or check out the rest of the set on Flickr. Lots more pictures should start coming tomorrow as Ron shows up – he’ll be using a new Canon Powershot A640, graciously provided by Canon. Thanks!

CES 2007 starts in the Airports

Posted on January 6, 2007 by Jeremy Toeman

I thought I’d be the first post on CES ’07, but Gizmodo beat me to it (some may call it cheating, others ingenuity… seeing the show floor during construction is definitely fun).

First up, over in SFO I saw a little cluster of laptops and saw none other than Peter Rojas and Ryan Block from Engadget, Veronica Belmont from CNet, and friend (sorry, I forgot your name!!).

Next I arrived in Vegas and the first thing I saw after going down the escalator was a mini-booth to pick up your CES badge. Neat idea now, but there was already a line forming.

Last up was Intel, who sponsored… baggage claim.

More to come later today after I check out CES Unveiled. In the meantime, read this article in the NY Times that outlines some of the costs relating to putting on the show.

I’ll be uploading all my CES 2007 photos to Flickr here.

10 More CES Tips

Posted on January 6, 2007 by Jeremy Toeman

Woke up this morning about 45 minutes before I actually needed to, but that was pretty much it for me and sleep this week. Que sera sera. I noticed my CES Tips article was a little more popular than my average post (extra special thanks to Michael, Kevin, Tris, Jeremiah and Darla) and taking a cue from those folks in Hollywood, I decided to write a sequel. And… action!

Be conscientious of booth staff. For most people, there’s nothing fun about booth duty (which is part of what makes me such a lunatic, I actually really enjoy it, but that’s a different story). It’s long, tedious, and can be quite frustrating. Not only that, there’s a lot of cross-departmental staffing. So if you have some really technical question you’ve been dying to ask a company, take a moment to ask whomever you are talking to what their job is, as they might not be the right person to badger. Also, lots of companies hire temps to help out at the show – it’s not a reflection that they don’t care about you, it’s just hard to staff a booth for 4 days and keep a company running at the same time!
The nights are cold. Vegas is in the middle of a big desert, and while it may be warm during the day, the nights are very cold in January. Bring a jacket or a sweater when you go out. But don’t forget to leave your CES badge in your hotel room before you leave for the night!
Moisturize. I’m not kidding. And bring chapstick too. Remember what I just said – it’s a desert, and deserts are dry.
Plan on 45 minutes between destinations. In a nutshell, if you are getting into a taxi, and you are going anywhere remotely central, it is going to take a long, long time to get there, and there’s nothing you can do about it. One recommendation I would make is ask your driver if there is a nearby alternate spot they can drop you off that might save you 10 or more minutes (e.g. drop at LV Hilton instead of LVCC).
Only get cabs at hotels or LVCC. You cannot hail a taxi in Vegas, so don’t bother trying. This was more like a “Vegas Tip” than CES-specific, but hey, couldn’t hurt!
Go to the International Zones. What started years back with exporters from Taiwan and Hong Kong has now expanded to include many nations. Countries buy small zones and put small vendors/manufacturers in booths to show their wares. You should be able to see everything from toasters with iPod docking stations to digital cameras embedded in the tip of a ballpoint pen.
Get your badge off-site. The lines to pickup badges will get long by about 10am Monday morning. Getting in Sunday during the day? Head over to the Venetian/Sands and pick up your badge ahead of time so you can roll into the show without a delay! There are a few other spots to do this, including the LV Hilton.
Don’t pester the booth babes. Don’t be that guy!
Bring business cards. I would say roughly 97% of the people that I’ve met at CES over the years who don’t have cards regret not having them. Maybe it seems cool now not to carry them. Maybe you think they are so 1990s (I actually beamed contact info to someone recently!). The truth is, there’s almost no reason not to carry cards, and even looking at it from a potential loss vs potential gain perspective says: carry the darn things!
Leave early. I don’t know if the word swarm or horde is more appropriate for the rush to the airport on the last day. I’ll probably head over about 3 hours before my flight, if not earlier. It may be true that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but for your own sake, you don’t want it to be you that stays in Vegas!

So there you have it. Like many sequels, it’s not quite as fresh as the original, but still adds a little something that made it worth the time.

I had one more, but it’s not really a tip. Want to have a bit of extra fun at the show? Go find the most bad-ass speakers/audio system you can find. Listen to a few demo tracks. Get really into it. Ask intelligent questions. React to the sound quality. Then, right before you leave, get in front of your demo guy. With a totally straight face, say the following:

“Thanks again for the demo, it was really impressive. Mind if I ask you one last question? When you rip MP3s, do you really think 192Kbps sounds better than 128K, because I can’t tell the difference myself.”

Have a great show everybody!

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