Mobile DTV could be a hard cell

A few days after the world focuses on my hometown of New York tonight, I’ll be flying toward its Las Vegas simulacrum en route to the Consumer Electronics Show. My colleagues and I will be participating in a number of presentations and roundtable discussions at CES, including:

• Make the Connection: Consumers and the Next Era of Digital Living at the NPD/DisplaySearch client cocktail reception
• Storage Technology and The Market for Entertainment and Consumer Storage, and Reaching and Informing Consumers and Channel Partners at Storage Visions 2009
• The annual TWICE retail roundtable at CES (a closed event)
• Delivering on Digital Entertainment, an Industry Report Card at CntrStg
• The 2008 Holiday Season: A Giving One or the Grinch? at CES (in the LVCC)
• Mobile DTV Primer: Separating the Wheat from the Chaff at CES (in the LVCC)

I’ll be moderating that last panel, which will bring together representatives from the worlds of broadcasting, wireless service providers, and mobile platforms. Most of the attention at CES is on giant screens, but the past year has seen an explosion in PC-based broadband TV and video on sites such as Hulu and those of the major broadcast networks. That’s a dramatic contrast from the walled gardens that have characterized the mobile TV offerings to date from providers such as MediaFLO USA and MobiTV, the latter of which recently passed the 5 million subscriber mark.

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