CES 2009 officially starts tomorrow, and Blu-ray.com has reporters on site to bring the latest news from the show. There have been a number of press events today, of which you will start seeing reports soon, including many that pertain to Blu-ray and related technologies. So far there are two themes that seem to run through most of the presentations:
- Blu-ray, with digital downloads looked upon as an extra means of providing trailers, games and other associated media to support the Blu-ray movie experience. Thus far, only LG has mentioned downloads as a method of obtaining movies, and even then it's a feature of their new Blu-ray player. This may change over the next few days, and we will keep you informed.
- How GREEN can we be. A large part of every press conference has focused on being environmentally friendly - from the manufacturing plants through to recycling after the life of the product. There is some good news for us that all the products coming out are more energy efficient, which means less money we give to the power companies. Manufacturers have managed to mention green frequently. For example, how many know that Sanyo makes solar panels (I assume they are talking about photovoltaic cells) and that they have been making them for the last 25 years! Now that you will have green players, fear not, there are green batteries to put in all those remote controls.
Blu-ray has lost its early adopter status and is being targeted at the non tech savvy market. Blu-ray drives are appearing as portable players with built in screens, in TVs, and "Home theater in box" (HTiB) while players are getting smaller and cheaper to produce. Now that Blu-ray is the work horse behind the content delivery system, what's coming next?
3D Blu-ray is well on it's way with the expectation that we will see this arriving in living rooms around the world early in 2010. We will need to wait until tomorrow to see what is on the show floor and the emphasis that is being shown by all the exhibitors.
At last attention is being turned to refining the components and cables downstream from the Blu-ray player while simplifying the interconnectivity and use.
The US and world economy has also been mentioned a number times. So far, all the CE manufacturers and industry experts that have spoken seem very upbeat and do not expect to be impacted too badly. This seems to be a bit of contradiction from numerous news reports, I guess we will just need to wait and see and hope for the best.
From all the Blu-ray.com team here at the CES we look forward to bringing you the latest and greatest news from the 2009 CES in Las Vegas.