CES 2019 Media Days Get Underway With 5G Looming Large

Pre-Game Show

By PERRY MICHAEL SIMON in LAS VEGAS: The annual CONSUMER ELECTRONICS SHOW, expected to be dominated by talk of the deployment of 5G wireless broadband as well as the continuing growth in self-driving cars, wearables, artificial intelligence, smart speakers, and “smart cities,” doesn't officially open until TUESDAY (1/8), but, as always, the crowds began to gather on SUNDAY for the beginning of two media days filled with press conferences and presentations, the latter of which included the CONSUMER TECHNOLOGY ASSOCIATION's Tech Trends reports.

The CTA's opening trends report once routinely included a detailed accounting of consumer electronics sales domestic and worldwide, but like last year, the presentation was light on numbers and heavy on predictions. After VP, Market Research STEVE KOENIG offered some cheerleading (trying to get the collected media going by calling out the show's theme, "are you CES ready?"), he introduced Sr. Dir., Innovation and Trends BEN ARNOLD and Dir., Market Research LESLEY ROHRBAUGH for a presentation about the state of the industry's evolution through the digital age of new devices (the '00s) and the connected age of social media and streaming (ending now) into the "data age," and touched upon the hot tech topics of the last few years -- 5G, self-driving vehicles, "smart homes," 8K TV, artificial intelligence, VR and AR, and digital health -- adding "resilient technologies" for disaster recovery, public alert systems, and the like.

The numbers were left to a handout distributed to the media on the seats at the presentation, showing projected U.S. consumer technology retail revenues to hit $398 billion in 2019, up from $351 million in 2017. Consumer spending on music and video streaming services, which went up 35% last year, are projected to increase 25% this year to $26 billion. Smart speaker revenue is expected to rise 7% to $3.2 million with unit sales up 5% to 36.6 million units.

MONDAY's schedule is largely composed of press conferences from the likes of LG (which kicked off the day with plenty of 5G talk, including its adoption of a new QUALCOMM Snapdragon “5G ready” chip and the promise of an upcoming 5G phone, plus a network of home appliances that make recommendations and prompt users for maintenance, what promises to be the first of many OLED 8K TV announcements (an 88-incher), a “rollable” TV that curls into a roll for storage, and a beer-making machine), PANASONIC, TOYOTA, SAMSUNG, and SONY, along with a relative handful of panels at the LAS VEGAS CONVENTION CENTER. The exhibit halls open on TUESDAY at the LVCC and SANDS, and a heavy schedule of content-related panels are on the slate for WEDNESDAY at the ARIA.

And late MONDAY, SONY debuted the latest weapon in its high quality audio initiative, "360 Reality Audio," a spatial audio platform that the company says sounds like being at a live concert. The initial streamers planning to offer 360 Reality Audio content are DEEZER, NUGS.NET, QOBUZ, and TIDAL.

Smart Speaker Spotlight

NPR CMO MEG GOLDTHWAITE and EDISON RESEARCH's TOM WEBSTER offered insight into the rapid adoption of smart speakers and voice control from the Spring 2019 "Smart Audio Report" in a presentation at the CONVENTION CENTER on MONDAY morning. WEBSTER, pulling highlights from the study (which was released TODAY, noted that 21% of Americans 18+ own a smart speaker, (53 million, with 14 million added in 2018 alone), and as the devices move from the early adopter to early majority category, WEBSTER said that the number of users with multiple smart speaker devices has grown in the last year, resulting in a 78% increase in the number of devices in use. Moreover, a third of Americans say they plan to buy another smart speaker device in the next six months. Meanwhile, most respondents say they use the device every day.

Smart speakers have jumped to second place among devices used for audio listening, and they have taken over first place among first adopters, but WEBSTER added that the use of smart speakers for audio is additive -- users are listening to more rather than replacing another device with a smart speaker. A wide majority of users say they use the speakers to listen to news -- and a lot of it at that, and almost half use the speakers to listen to AM/FM radio (and podcast listening on the devices is increasing as well).

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