Stewart Schley, DST Correspondent

Easily the best line uttered at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show was overheard by my colleague, Leslie Ellis, who listened in as two friends walked away from a dazzling high-definition TV display from the big electronics company Samsung. “Dude, except for your cheese dip, that’s the best thing ever,” gushed one of the admirers.

Hard to top that one for sheer color, but a quote from one of the industry executives appearing on a CES panel was memorable for another reason. The assembled executives were busy addressing interesting new developments in downloadable media, portable devices and TV signals delivered over the Internet when one of them, Ken Morse of cable TV industry manufacturer Scientific-Atlanta, remarked that, “It’s all very exciting right now, but the penetration of those is incredibly small.”

Okay, so there’s no enticing cheese dip analogy at work there, but he makes a point. Stalking the show floor at the annual electronics industry gathering, it’s easy to be smitten by the new possibilities of converged digital media. That thing called D.A.V.E. TV that lets me watch television from the Internet? Gotta have one. A Slingbox to send my TV channels halfway across the world to my laptop in Puerto Rico? Need it. A new service called Vongo that lets me download movies to a PC and watch them whenever? Perfect.

In fairness, those are all provocative ideas. But if you combined the total number of customers for all three, you wouldn’t be able to fill Wrigley Field. In our journalistic lust for capturing the next new thing, we tend to overlook the reality of the marketplace.

As Morse points out, there is one portable media technology that in fact has taken the world by storm. It allows users to watch movies of their choice whenever they want, and it has a portability quality that untethers the content from the big living-room TV set. It’s called a DVD player. According to industry sales figures released last week by the Digital Entertainment Group, consumers spent $22 billion last year buying and renting DVDs, an 8 percent gain from 2004. More telling: 89 million U.S. households now have DVD players. That’s roughly 75 percent of the country. Or about 88.99 million more homes than D.A.V.E. TV has.

I had a chance to visit last week with Jason Krikorian, a co-founder of Sling Media, the California company that invented the Slingbox. Don’t get me wrong: I love the product and the concept (and as a baseball fan, I appreciate that Jason and his brother Blake dreamed up the idea in part so they could watch Giants games while they were on the road). But I also love the fact that it’s the open marketplace, not a battle of press-releases or CES displays, that ultimately determines the fate of new gadgets. In the end, people are skeptical. Making a meaningful dent in the market is very hard. That’s makes the critical mass achieved by products like DVD players, telephones, cable television and high-speed Internet access all the more impressive. As for the percentage of households that enjoy homemade cheese dip, I’m still researching that one.

Stewart Schley writes about media and technology from Englewood, Colo.