Part 1 of 5 in Todd’s CES Tech Report coverage.

We all agree CES is massive, huge. It’s also, I contend, beyond individual comprehension. You really need to take digital notes all the time to remember the unbelievable amount of content you’re absorbing, or a full team of dopplegangers.

Besides all the bloggy hoopla about ultrabooks, tablets, 3D (again!) and OLED TVs, a couple of deeper themes have started to suggest themselves from the maelstrom of product announcements, brochures, booth demos, slot machines, and shocking lack of decent food. I’m going to cover a couple, starting with the most prevalent item at the show.

Home Media Aggregator. It wasn’t a proper booth without a media aggregation platform. Everyone had one, from the obvious choices (Microsoft, Motorola, Intel) to the not-so-obvious (Panasonic? Hisense?) to – well, everyone (LG? Technicolor?).

However, I struggle to really, really get the huge user problem everyone is racing to solve. The stated base use cases for these things are, to me, not so compelling as to be differentiating.

All the vendors’ solutions…

1. Grab content from all connected devices on your network
2. Provide integrated search to that content and NetFlix, YouTube and other – usually proprietary – network providers
3. Allow you to use the content from any connected device on another
4. Stop watching on one device, and pick up on another
5. And have social networking sprinkled on top, either for recommendations or real-time check-in/tweeting, joint watching.

I mean, it might be clever to start watching on my iPad and pick it up on the TV, but it’s not going to change my life.  It’s solving a problem I’m not sure I really cared about. I’m not even sure if I’m annoyed by it.

In fact, the first four you could almost consider to be commodity user features – there’s only so many ways to search content – except that is not standardized at all at the networking level. Everyone is connecting to content differently; some use DLNA, some use their own proprietary network (VieraConnect, say). As a result, the networking connections, tweaking and device compatibility is right up in users faces, and they have to really think if one device will work with another one – or give in, and buy them all from the same vendor, which is the unspoken, assumed, and fervent hope of said vendor.

The second problem is that, increasingly, all this video content is up in the cloud – usually someone else’s cloud. For example, YouTube is channelizing itself and encouraging studios and brands to build channels. The infrastructure, production, and distribution costs are tremendously cheaper. YouTube’s projection is that in 2020 – not that far away now – 75% of  video content will be digital native. That’s a tremendous shift. If I’m streaming most of my stuff from the cloud, what is the experience on the STB about?

Eventually some networking standard – DLNA, say – will probably win in the home, and the network and the rest of the twiddly bits will recede to the background where it belongs, and all the content will be streaming: and then where will all the different vendors be? Competing on a pretty common set of user needs, but, in a very important way, separately from their own hardware.  As a result, I’d look for independent people already working on the problem, and already focused on the user experience – like Frequency, Twonky, etc, – to be the long-term winners. There is a chance, based on their control of the cable STB market, that Moto or Intel could be very well placed if they really got the user experience story down.

The third problem I saw is that everyone wants to control the content that you create, like photos and the like. Everyone – Sony, Samsung, etc – have their own cloud service that you can upload all your content to, so you can solve that deadly sharing across devices problem you have. Except I’m already storing my photos in the cloud – Flickr, Facebook, Apple, Google. Actually, if they checked it out, a lot of people are doing the same, he notes drily. So what value am I getting by downloading it from one cloud, and putting it in another cloud? So I can share it across Sony devices? Aren’t I doing that already?

There was a little bit of wheel re-inventing too, where Samsung created its own social network – Family Share – that looked remarkably like the system I already use to share stuff with my distributed family – Facebook. Except with less features and probably less noise, to be sure.

Truths for marketers

Video is growing rapidly, with huge reach and engagement. One great ad on YouTube will get a large number of engaged viewers as compared with another ad-blocked banner.  Secondly, your channels are blurring on output devices. Your short-form video on YouTube is showing up right next to your product placements in CSI, and increasingly that device is mobile. You need a clear, consistent content strategy.

In following posts, I’ll talk about cars as connected platforms, connected health devices, and how user experience, problem understanding, and usability are still and again the biggest and lasting differentiator a product developer can focus on.

Todd Drake is the VP of Technology at Organic