Stewart Schley, DST Correspondent

From the familiar iPod to the novel Slingbox, a parade of interesting new digital media devices marched its way through the 2006 International Consumer Electronics Show. Most are variations on an increasingly familiar theme that industry people tend to think of (and sometimes fear) as a shift in the control over media consumption patterns away from corporations and toward individuals. Whether it’s an iPod that shuffles songs you love from a personal playlist, or a portable video player that lets you watch a recorded TV show while you’re jostling on the subway, new media gadgets represent an unmistakable, and irreversible, movement toward consumer control.

Working behind the scenes to enable these new devices is a common element that tends to be taken for granted: the presence of a high-speed, extremely reliable delivery network that is to new media what electricity is to the common household lamp.

Almost every new digital media gadget sharing the CES spotlight depends on a connection to a broadband digital media network for its care and feeding. The most commonly used broadband network, at least in the U.S., is the high-speed network infrastructure built and tended to by Cable.

According to the most recent data compiled from company reports, cable companies account for about 57 percent of the 40 million high-speed Internet connections in the U.S. today. Telephone companies serve most of the remainder of the market, and an emerging cadre of providers ranging from electrical power networks to high-speed wireless services makes up a fractional share.

It’s these networks, increasingly common to everyday citizens, that have ushered in a torrent of innovation in digital media. Today a typical U.S. cable company delivers an aggregated amount of bandwidth – the raw delivery capacity of a network – of some 5 gigabits per second, an astonishing feat that was inconceivable just a few years ago.

Whether users are fetching copies of TV shows to their digital recorders, compiling playlists from iTunes, rigging up home networks that sling digital media content around the house or simply – perish the thought – sitting around watching TV, it’s the quiet presence of a digital broadband network that makes much of these activities possible. Like electricity itself, we tend to overlook its contribution. But the new era of consumer-controlled media wouldn’t be here without it.

Stewart Schley is a freelance journalist who writes about media and technology from Englewood, Colorado.