Each year Shelly Palmer guides a tour of National Academy members through the forrest of technology that is CES. It's a grueling 4 hour tromp from booth to booth...with headphones for the group so that we can listen to reps from the companies give their Shpiel and answer questions. It's the only time you get any quality attention at CES - since the size of the group (20+) and the weight of the organizations (we do the Emmys) means that the otherwise harried execs need to take a moment to explain - or try to explain - what their companies strategy is for the next 12 months.

Here's a quick snapshot of this years tour:

NATAS tour / Friday... 1:45 pm /

Direct TV.... The news there is Channel 101. Direct goes into the content biz with a video game show, a music show (CD America) and a Dating show (that's driven by User Generated Video).

The other interesting thing about the Direct TV booth was the mention that a future box they were deploying would have a broadband input. Why is that interesting? Because Cable, Satellite, everyone is worried about the day that broadband will become the predominate pipe for content and the current big dogs in that race find themselves without any differentiating features. Cable has a leg up because they're running the broadband pipes (along with DSL) and they can win the so called 'triple play' of cable, broadband, and telephone services.

Next stop - Hllcrest Labs. Hllcrest has built a cool hand held (gyroscopic) controller. They're building software solution for controlling content - and it's truly the closest thing to the matrix i've seen in real life. With an incredibly smooth 3d world, you can choose movies, photographs, VOD choices, with the ability to drill down, see related titles, and explore content in a very hands on way.

At Intel, all the talk was viiv - an attempt to reposition the chip maker as a content platform. As intel replace the old 'intel inside' branding with the new 'viiv' product, you begin to see a trend. Intel doesn't want to be generic silicon, but rather a brand that consumers come to trust and rely on. Once again, a fear of the coming comodification of the pipe.

A brief stop at the WiMax alliance both shows clues about the future. Because the USB 2.0 standard that's moving from hardwire to broadband gives use some clues about what the world might look like when HD video can travel throughout he air and around your house.

Samsung had the latest offering in it's line of handheld DV cameras with removable cameras - the SC-HDX15 720P camcorder records onto 4GB of built-in flash memory for around 30 minutes of HD quality video. (disclosure, i went back after the tour to actually see this device...so it didn't get covered the first time through).

The LG booth is was chock full of HD flatscreens - many of them with hard drives and DVR functionality actually built into the monitor. I've never been a fan of LG, but i have to say their screens looked pretty amazing... maybe the best i'd seen to date.

Our last stop was SONY... where the announcement of the Sony Reader... a book like screen that is an ebook like device. But it's surprisingly flat. text and the page. No pictures, no magazine player, just a new ebook reader. Not that that is a bad thing.

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more blogging to come... on:
Keynote: Terry Semel. UGC, Citizen Journalism.
Keynote: Howard Stringer. Content and technology are married.