CES Says It Will Weed Out Unqualified Preregistrations

CEA said the Jan. 2004 CES drew 132,298 attendees, which was up from 117,704 a year earlier, and Chupka and CEA Pres. Gary Shapiro said they would accept a dropoff to as little as 100,000 if weeding out unqualified attendees yielded a higher “quality” turnout. They sidestepped our questions about whether the remark could be interpreted to mean past CES events had attracted a lot of enthusiasts. They also declined to speculate how many preregistrants might need to be weeded out.

Chupka said the 2005 event would feature 1.5 million net sq. ft. of exhibitors and 2,400 exhibiting companies - - including Motorola and Nokia, which will return to the main show floor. Other CES disclosures: (1) The number of foreign delegations will grow to 40, about double the number at the 2004 event. Shapiro said CES attendance would benefit from the effects of a weak dollar overseas. (2) CES will introduce a number of visitor-friendly improvements, Chupka said, including a boost in the number of food services accessible to visitors on the main show floor. Other refinements will include more badge-holder pickup locations and better color-coded signage, with icons for each of 8 major product categories. The South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center will open at 9 a.m. on the show’s opening day, dispensing with the traditional 10 a.m. opening that had been blamed for overcrowding.

(3) The new Renaissance Las Vegas hotel is scheduled to open in Dec. near South Hall and will house hospitality and meeting rooms for qualified exhibitors, Chupka said. The Renaissance also will be home to a new digital media training center for retail personnel. (4) Shuttle-bus transportation will be enhanced to and from the specialty audio exhibits at the Alexis Park Hotel, Chupka said. (5) CEA has no independent knowledge about the fate of the Las Vegas monorail, which went out of commission soon after it began operating in July. If monorail service is reinstated for the show, it will be “gravy,” Chupka said, adding that CES transportation services were planned without the monorail in mind. -- Paul Gluckman

CEA Forum Notebook

The Blu-ray camp is “actively evaluating” AACS content protection that already has been adopted by the rival HD DVD format, and it’s likely the formats will come to market with the same content protection system, Richard Doherty of Panasonic Hollywood Lab told the Optical Systems Symposium running concurrent with the CEA event by the Optical Systems Technology Assn. (OSTA). He said such a development would take content protection “off the table” as a debating point between the formats, and “I think the studios will like that.” Panasonic and Sony of the Blu-ray camp are among the founding members of the AACS licensing authority, as is Toshiba from the HD DVD side.

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It’s doubtful the CE industry will reach its goal of shipping a million CableCARD-ready DTV sets by year-end, CEA Pres. Gary Shapiro told us. He said one reason for the shortfall was that cable had given the consumer “confusing” messages on unidirectional plug-&-play.

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Women derogatorily “equate the CE industry” with the experience of buying a car before Saturn entered the market, Best Buy executive Nancy Brooks said Mon. She is the Best Buy executive responsible for cultivating the “Jill” demographic in the chain’s “customer centricity” model. Jen Drechsler -- a consultant hired by Best Buy when Brooks said “we realized we didn’t have the competency” to determine how to market to women -- said Best Buy deserves credit because it “brought women into the process early and often” to figure it out. Drechsler said women buyers often are mistakenly referred to as a “minority,” when in fact, it’s white males who are the true minority in the market. She said women represent 85% of consumer purchases and account for 57% of CE industry revenue. “What’s probably more important than any of that is she has 95% veto power over what’s coming into her house,” Drechsler said. Women are more technology-savvy than most give them credit for, she said. But women need to be shown “how the technology works for them, not how they need to work for the technology. She doesn’t need the extra bells and whistles to make her excited” unless they can be shown to save her time or lower her daily stress, Drechsler said.

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Compatibility between recordable DVD media and DVD- ROM drives has improved to 91-92% with the latest discs and hardware, said Subutai Ahmad of YesVideo, who chairs the OSTA DVD Compatibility Committee that includes representatives of the DVD Assn. and the National Institute of Standards & Technology. The committee recently completed the 2nd phase of compatibility testing and found that errors at the outer edges of recordable discs continue to be the industry’s biggest blight, Ahmad said. As a “caveat” to consumers in light of the “edge effect” of recordable media, he advised avoiding filling the last 10% of any disc. Some 38 of 50 discs tested failed at the outer edge, and if the edge effect had been factored out, compatibility would have soared to 98%, he said. In its tests, the committee found DVD burners performed very reliably and there were no significant disc-hardware compatibility issues between formats, he said.

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A CEA working group released its “recommended practice” in hopes of promoting the easing of restrictions on portable electronic devices (PEDs) aboard commercial aircraft. The backbone of the voluntary specification is an icon that shows a PED’s transmitter has been turned off, permitting its use between takeoffs and landings. Jeff Schiffer of Intel, who chairs the working group, said he hoped CE makers and airlines will adopt the icon and use it widely. As one suggestion, Schiffer said, the icon could replace the no-smoking signs still found on all aircraft. CEA released testimonials from American, Continental and Northwest Airlines all pledging support for the recommended practice. Also supporting it were the Assn. of Flight Attendants and Qualcomm.