Big Content: the frenemy of consumer electronics makers

A trip to CES is a combination of candy store window shopping and a trip to some nightmarish, dystopian future with thirteen-dollar-an-hour WiFi. Beneath all of the shiny gadgets, desperate marketing pitches, bizarre keynotes and sleep deprivation, there were a number of themes emerging at CES as the manufacturers of all these shiny toys tried to latch onto something to pull themselves out of the doldrums that hung over the last year. One was the lengths device-makers will go to for content; another was the anointment of "cloud" as a critical feature check-box.

For two industries that are so dependent on each other, the relationship between the gadget industry and content creators is an awfully strained one, bordering on domestic violence. On my last day at CES, I spoke briefly with CEA President Gary Shapiro and listened to his invective about how the content industry was trying to kill the Internet. The tension between the content and consumer technology communities has been around for decades—since the creation of the cassette tape, at least—and it doesn't seem to be getting any more amicable.

Which is ironic, because the tech business has never sucked up to Big Content quite as much as it seemed to be this year at CES. After all, it's content that makes people use all the gear that was being peddled at CES, whether it be software or video or music or text. And some of the companies at CES were showing the level of desperation they had reached in trying to get exclusive content to help power their shiny Internet-connected toys.

Perhaps the most obvious instance of wretchedness came from Panasonic, which announced a new "social TV" service in partnership with…MySpace. There are other ways to get Justin Timberlake to show up at your press event, Panasonic.

Samsung is so desperate to get content to sell more 3D televisions that it is essentially paying NBC to make 3D versions of shows that have gone off the air, including Battlestar Galactica. And Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's talk about Xbox during his keynote was dominated by announcements of content deals—some old, like those with Comcast and Verizon, and some new, like those with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and Fox.

So can't they all just get along, and leave the poor Internet out of this? Think of the children.

Then there's cloud, a word so widely used and abused at CES that I'm starting to think its use should be restricted to talk about the weather. Cloud was to CES 2012 what untenable tablets were to last year's show. Panasonic seems to have decided everything from televisions to business phones to point-of-sale systems to digital signage needs to be wired into their proprietary cloud somehow (mostly to keep Samsung from stealing their customers). Cameras, scanners, routers, 3D printers, network-attached storage—all of them had cloud tie-ins. There was even Feedair, a little personal scrolling digital sign shaped like a cartoon balloon that ties into a cloud alert aggregator which is somehow supposed to be less intrusive than a smartphone push message or an on-screen alert.

And not only does everything have to have a cloud connection, but everyone has to have their own privately branded cloud, apparently. In an attempt to make the Internet compelling to consumers, it seems the industry wants to turn it into more walled gardens in the process—essentially guaranteeing that no one will ever use those features. Panasonic has a cloud game developer program, which I'm sure will get all sorts of traction from unemployed webOS developers.

As my MacBook Air's iCloud sync brought my connection to the press room WiFi to its knees for the fifth time, I couldn't help think what all this cloud debris was going to do to the Internet—or, for that matter, to the corporate networks that all these smartphones, cloud-connected ultrabooks, and other gadgets would be inflicted upon.

And they will be, there's no doubt. It was clear just how relentlessly consumer devices are marching into business IT. Microsoft's announcement that the Kinect's API will be shipping for Windows next month and the spread of voice, facial recongnition and gesture-based interfaces to just about everything are bound to work their way into board rooms and executive suites before long, as well as other business markets. It's bound to soon bring new meaning to "flipping off" your work computer.

Listing image by Photo illustration by Aurich Lawson