Silence is probably the best way to say goodbye to the CE industry for 2011. With notable, familiar exceptions, the past year will go down in the annals of history as one most of the industry wishes to forget. History demands, however, that we at least take a quick look back at some of the biggest challenges of 2011 and think about how things might be different in 2012.
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Connected Intelligence’s recently published “Content Adoption Report,” highlights both the good and bad news for publishers resulting from the impact of digital. The bad news for book publishers, nearly 40 percent of consumers who read e-content say that they are buying fewer books. The good news, more than one third of consumers say that they are filling the physical book gap with digital e-book content.
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I recall a time when MTV was a leader in popular culture. It was edgy, unique, and a must-watch channel in order to stay current within one’s peer group. Unfortunately for Viacom, this peer group is now using smartphones and tablets to view content, rather than sitting around the family TV, and the company’s attempts to resist the cable companies’ goal of addressing this need is about as futile as King Cnut’s attempt to stop the tide from coming in.
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Late last week on the DisplaySearch blog, my colleague Richard Shim observed the imperfect fit that both carrier and electronics store channels offer for tablets. Indeed, Sunday’s Super Bowl included a commercial for the Motorola Xoom that offers some clues of what to expect in the channels as iPad competition heats up in 2011.
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Best Buy’s poor results today are not a glimpse into the future but a mirror into the past. As we have been saying for much of 2010 this year is likely to be a very difficult one for most consumer electronics categories. Very high penetration rates and the effect of two years of growth above the overall retail economy have put consumer electronics ahead of the curve. It is now time that the rest of the market catches up.
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This year’s CES was four days of meetings, events, booth tours, and crowds as it is every year. But this year’s show was, unlike last year, imbued with a sense of optimism and opportunity that was absent in 2009. At times even the most innovative and interesting products can get lost in a sea of product demos, displays, and PR hype. And while knowing what is new and noteworthy is the first question people ask me, it is often the last thing I care about. Because, it’s not what’s on the show floor that’s always most important, it’s what ends up in consumers’ homes, sooner rather than later, that counts because that’s where the money is. And what’s new, innovative, and different at CES is often a bit away from hitting the store shelves or being relevant to a mainstream consumer.
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Consumer Technology | Stephen Baker, Vice President, Industry Analysis | 
January 5, 2012 1:40 pm | 
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