Dallas Clement
Senior VP, Strategy & Development, Cox Communications

Not surprisingly, the three-day CES featured seemingly several years worth of new-product announcements and technology developments. From my perspective, I doubt many of these products will be on the shelves of your neighborhood electronics store in the foreseeable future. But the show definitely showcased some advancements that have the potential to at least begin altering consumer entertainment and communications this year.

As I predicted in my CES wish list, among the biggest buzz-makers were Intel's Viiv technology and Microsoft's Vista operating system and Media Center PC. In fact, Microsoft's presentation was one of the two events at CES that solidified Cable's increasing role in the CE revolution. The second was the CableLabs-led announcement of commitment between the Cable and CE industries on the OpenCable Application Platform (OCAP) that will spur development of two-way interactive services.

Now the hard work begins to make both announcements reality.

Our industry's CableCARD agreement with Microsoft, which essentially will make Cable's high-value digital content available to potentially millions of PC users, was featured in the Bill Gates Show on Thursday. While it wasn't as significant a part of the Microsoft execs' presentation as I'd like to have seen, their demo of the Media Center PC attached to a CableCARD did reportedly generate a lot of interest from the press, and buzz seemed to build over the remainder of the show.

Of the three "ecosystems" in the home – voice, data and video – we've already seen convergence between voice and data, but the CableCARD agreement represents some of the first overlapping of the video and data ecosystems. As this connection is further developed, and more and more cable content is made available over the net, it will be incumbent on us in Cable to ensure we have a clear presence on the computer and that users realize they are watching Cable programming.

With both the CableCARD and OCAP developments, 2006 will be a critical building year in which we will have to figure out digital rights management, portability and other significant issues leading to commercial deployment, probably in 2007. But while there's plenty of work ahead of us, I'm encouraged by the growing cooperation between Cable and CE manufacturers and, more importantly, by the work being done on numerous fronts to ensure consumers receive the highest-quality digital content and interactive services when, where and how they want them – and that they get them from Cable.