PMPs come out in Las Vegas
Personal Media Players are the next big thing. Or that's what electronics companies are hoping.
January 19, 2004: 10:31 AM EST
By Peter Lewis, Fortune Magazine
LAS VEGAS (Fortune Magazine) - Las Vegas is surely the world capital of What Could Have Been. I could have hit the jackpot on the slots if only I hadn't stopped feeding it silver dollars. Britney Spears could have had a long, happy marriage if not for the annulment.
And Microsoft's new MSN Premium online service could have had the coolest new product introduction at last week's Consumer Electronics Show, if only there had been a way to affix MSN butterfly wings to the Flying Elvi, the skydiving Elvis impersonators. But, alas, it was not to be.
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It was that kind of show. Unlike Las Vegas, which has elevated weirdness to an art form — there are celebrity impersonators here who have themselves surgically altered to look like Michael Jackson — CES is merely strange. More than 100,000 people come to the CES show to see the newest gizmos and gadgets the world has to offer. (And a few thousand more come to see the Adult Entertainment Expo, which is held at the same time, and sometimes their paths cross, but that's another story.)
With the seriousness of nuclear plant engineers examining a malfunctioning control panel, grown men (and women) at CES examine digital toys that make barfing noises, or automobile subwoofers that cause one's ears to bleed, or wristwatches that double as the world's worst video cameras. They're all looking for the Next Big Thing that will capture the imaginations and the dollars of the world's consumers, the way that big-screen TVs, DVD players, and digital cameras have done in the past year.
It's strange because all of a sudden, with little warning, 500 companies will decide en masse that consumers want to be able to transfer their digital photographs wirelessly from the media server in the closet to the TV monitor in the living room while pulling a musical soundtrack off the laptop computer in Jimmy's room. Never mind that consumers STILL haven't figured out how to program the clock on their VCRs, and that setting up a simple home network can reduce a veteran computer scientist to a ranting psychopath.
No, at CES the companies decided that this will be the year of convergence, when Joe and Jane Sixpack will miraculously be struck with a vision of transferring their digital media files from one smart appliance to another, sort of the way Richard Dreyfus was imbued with a vision of weird-looking mountains in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
Maybe it's something in the Las Vegas water supply.
Chasing the gizmos
This really was a show about convergence, but for industries more than products.
CES is now the premier annual event for the PC industry as well as for the consumer electronics business. PC sales have been flat for a few years, prompting computer companies to go searching for new avenues of growth. Although there appear to be signs of growth once again in the PC business, the fastest-growing product areas are in consumer electronics — DVD players, digital cameras, mobile phones, flat-panel TVs, and portable MP3 players.
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Apple reported better-than-expected financial results Wednesday, driven mainly by sales of its iPod portable music player. Gateway flubbed its numbers last week, but the drag on profits was from the PC side of the business (selling laptops at a loss); sales of consumer electronics products including plasma TVs and digital cameras were brisk, company executives said. HP announced last week that it will get into the flat-panel TV business, too, but the bombshell was its surprise alliance with Apple to sell an HP-branded version of the iPod (no name yet, but I'm guessing the HPod) and to put a link to Apple's iTunes Music Service on new HP home computers. (It's still unclear whether the Hpod will support Windows Media Audio files, which would allow it to work with online music services other than iTunes.) Dell is slapping its label on TVs, DVD players, MP3 players, and other CE devices.
Six months ago, a visitor to one of Gateway's retail stores would stroll past rows of computers until finding, at the back of the store, a lonely plasma TV. Today it's the reverse; the computers are at the back of the store. Consumer electronics is the company's new focus, because that's where the profits currently are found. Or, to be more accurate, potential profits.
Intel, best known for supplying the microprocessors and chipsets that power desktop and portable computers, seemed most excited at CES to show off its Xscale processors, which are used in CE devices ranging from bigger-and-cheaper TV sets to portable media players.
Pumping up the PMPs
Portable media players were the new-gizmo-du-jour at CES, with more than a dozen companies showing off prototypes, ranging from Samsung and Sanyo to companies little known beyond the hutongs of Beijing. The idea behind PMPs (pronounce it however you like) is, basically, that just as millions of people have bought portable audio players like the iPod as a way to download and enjoy music on the go, bazillions more will want to download movies and TV shows and music videos onto a pocket-size device for enjoyment outside the house or office. The prototypes I saw were slightly smaller than paperback books, with uninspiring color screens, and with projected prices ranging from $400 to $800.
Hmm. I don't see the appeal of these PMPs, at least not the ones on display at CES. They're too expensive. They're too big and heavy, unless you wear cargo pants. Battery life is probably going to be inadequate. Hollywood is going to stroke out over the idea of people trying to rip their movies onto portable players. And while there have been times on a long flight when I thought it would be amusing to have, say, last night's "Daily Show" or Yankees game on hand, I'm more likely to prefer the big screen of my laptop computer to the relatively dinky screen of the PMP.
On the other hand, I'm unlikely to use my laptop on the subway or on the train coming into the office. But to me the biggest killer is this: I can listen to my iPod while doing other things, like driving or reading or writing. Video, in contrast, is a brain-bandwidth hog. PMPs are more demanding of their owners. It's an entirely different experience.
Maybe I'll get interested if PMPs ever get down to iPod-level pricing, and when it's as easy to record and transfer my favorite TV shows to a PMP as it is to get my music collection onto my iPod. Or, maybe I'll get interested if I decide to take a long bus or train ride to work every day. But in that case, being an old fart, I'd probably read a newspaper or magazine.
Someday, some company — maybe a PC company! — will unveil a thin, lightweight electronic media reader that can morph as needed into an e-book or magazine, web browser, video display, audio player, game console, digital picture frame, crossword puzzle, high-rez radio receiver, e-mail manager, or whatever. It should consist of two high-resolution color display panels, about the same size and weight as the cover of a hardback book (with all the pages torn out), with the fuel-cell battery and radio data transceiver in the spine. And it should cost less than $500.
I was really hoping to bring home such a device from CES. But all I got was this lousy PMP.
