CES Trend #3: High-def displays seek differentiation to avoid commoditization

Scott Fulton, BetaNews: If you've been following our CES 2008 coverage since the few days before our team arrived in Las Vegas, you probably found yourself asking an interesting question: Has BetaNews forgotten how to count?

After all, we had a Top 10 countdown, and we ended up at #4. Well, we do have a bit of an excuse for you: First of all, we had some material already planned about the high-definition format war. That material became quickly outdated after the events of last weekend, and with the crowd at CES starting to see Blu-ray as the front-runner, if not the outright leader, for the first time.

Then there's the matter of our appearance. If you've followed us for an even longer while, you realize that all through CES week, BetaNews looked differently than it had throughout the last four years. We worked overtime to try to widen our page and change our format, because we knew we'd be publishing about 140 or so pieces during the week of the show. Under our old system, our news would have dropped off the front page after only two hours' exposure.

So we postponed our countdown at #4, like a ticking bomb in a James Bond film. But we always keep our promises to our readers in one form or another, so now we're going to tick down the rest of the way, this time taking into account what we've all learned this week, and with contributions from several of our regulars as well as our special CES analyst this week. We resume our countdown at #3, with a look at a trend we noticed this time in Las Vegas but, quite honestly, didn't exactly predict:

The television manufacturing industry wants to do things differently this time around. An entirely new generation of digital TVs is being produced now, but manufacturers are using ingenuity and wherewithal to try to distinguish their products from each other's in unique ways. Naturally, one reason is to make a serious value proposition to the consumer.

But there's a mutual interest here as well: There's a genuine fear that the HDTV industry will end up, to put it literally, like the PC industry...with manufacturers finding themselves producing essentially the same system with very little differentiation, at dangerously little margin.

We'll begin our examination with Jackie Emigh in New York.

Jacqueline Emigh, BetaNews: In efforts to avoid commodization, HD display makers at CES made strong efforts to differentiate their flat panel products on the basis of size, resolution, and targeted use, as well as some less conventional factors.

As you might expect, generally speaking, the size of HD displays went hand-in-hand with their respective purposes. In other words, the larger displays tended to be home TV screens, and the smaller displays to be PC monitors. But this wasn't necessarily the case.

Samsung, for example, wowed CES visitors with an HD display that differed from anything else at the show -- not just on the basis of its ultra large format, but also because of its integrated interactive technology from Reactix.

Designed to recognize and react to a consumer's position and gestures, Reactix' WAVE technology provides configurable levels of interactivity that intensify as a person gets closer to the screen.

At CES, Samsung and Reactix used apparently Wii-inspired sports games to give showgoers the hang of how the big gizmo works. But ultimately, the huge display was intended for advertising purposes.

In terms of products for the home, Norcent, for example, showed HDTVs at both ends of the size spectrum, ranging from 42- and even 47-inch units, evidently for jumbo living rooms, down to 22- and 19-inch LCD TVs geared to smaller rooms.

A lot of vendors, including Norcent, touted high-end visual display and audio characteristics -- and for the larger and pricier TVs, these tended to include 1080p resolution, high contrast ratio, 3D immersive sound, and varying numbers of inputs for HDMI (high-definition multimedia interface) -- an emerging plug-in interface for HD displays, DVRs, and other devices.

Yet some companies went to the opposite extreme, downplaying resolution in favor of capabilities for accommodating for the bandwidth limitations of wireless networks, as well as for those of most home networking technologies, with the exception of Ethernet.

On the tiniest side, On2 Technologies demoed solutions for HD video on mobile phones. The HD mobile displays themselves, though, were not from On2, since On2 is a specialist in video compression, not display technology.

On2 also showed how its same V6 compression can be used in streaming HD video for display on PC monitors -- and how its V7 compression comes into play in relaying broadcast solutions such as ABC Networks' HD for viewing on HDTV display screens.

Next: Sharon Fisher on market differentiation, and Ed Oswald on what stands out most...