What's the Consumer Electronics Show gonna be all about

The US kicks off 2006 with their annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas. Only this year it seems more du jour than ever before. After all, consumer electronics is red, red hot. As fashions go, consumer electronics seems to be it and could even remain that way until the end of this decade.

So forget Prada and Gucci and Burberry and hello iPod, Xbox, Playstation, PSP, Rockr and Razr. If you don't have one of these by now your yesterday's news. After all, 2005's end of year shopping binge was headlined by consumer electronics, not clothes or toys or even PC's. Sorry Microsoft.

But, even given all this noise, what's gonna be the big theme at CES this year? Well, it looks like it's gonna be video. Yep, video. Or to be more precise digital video and digital TV. And really, video looks to be the killer app for 2006, both on PC's and mobile phones/handhelds.

And like Apple kicked off the (legal) digital music fad with the infamous iPod, their video iPod seems to be doing the same for digital video. Except for one difference. I can't help feeling that Apple will have nothing like the dominance in digital video that they have managed in music. Maybe they just launched the video iPod a little too late.

For everyone seems to be jumping on the back of digital video and TV. And Hollywood plus the TV networks are piling in and franchising cable companies, telephone companies (both fixed and mobile), internet portals, software companies, mobile and handheld hardware manufacturers, start-ups and more to offer content to their users.

So expect announcements from everyone about digital video. And expect 2006 to be the year that it happens. The losers will be cinema's and could ultimately even be cable companies, who have the stranglehold today. The winners of course will be the content creators and us, the consumers.

We'll keep you posted on the actual announcements from CES in Vegas all this week and give you our opinions. Sit back and enjoy. This is gonna be a great year for couch/desk/car/anywhere potatoes!