Original article written by David Keene on avnetwork.com

While most of the goings on at the huge CES show in Las Vegas this week do not directly affect the pro video, audio, and AV world, we can’t discount the growing trend of product development in the consumer electronics world powering R&D for displays and other technologies that will eventually impact the pro world. Not to mention the jockeying of the tech giants who love the pro world but who really make the lions share of their sales in CE. The days when all video, image processing, and user interface platform breakthroughs came first to pro video or broadcast and then filtered over to the consumer world are over. Today what Google, Apple, Samsung, LG, et al do best, they often do it first in the larger CE realm. The arrow of causality from pro to CE has not reversed completely or permanently but there is big momentum from the CE world on many fronts.

If you’re too busy designing a command and control center for a major city’s traffic control hub, a university teaching theater, a corporate meeting space, or a hospital data visualization system to attend CES and wade through drone pavilions and wearables to sleuth out what’s important, here are some highlights of what from the CE(S) world should be on your radar, as CES 2018 rolls up a tumultuous week in Las Vegas:

Emissive displays vs. non-emissive displays

8K is not the big story from CES. It's a story, but 8K is the same story– the same evolution– for every display manufacturer. At CES 2018 two of the most important things that happened in the display realm of significance are: LG doubled down on OLED breakthroughs, and Samsung showed they can do “emissive” too. Revolution? It’s part of one– that we in the large screen video world are seeing in other quarters.

Click here to read more about these displays.

Google vs. Amazon (Why should you care?)

In 2017 Google Assistant emerged as the first serious contender to Alexa– so CES 2018 is being seen as Google vs. Amazon for the “voice ecosystem” by some. Why is this important? Google Home, it’s being touted at CES, will be the company's best-selling hardware product. That’s saying a lot, since the Chromebook was and is a hugely successful product– largely fueled by the K-12 education market. Recent numbers from consulting firm Futuresource said Google was commanding 58 percent of U.S. K-12 school market for devices (tablets, netbooks, etc). Windows is in second with 22 percent and the combined MacOS and iOS are at 19 percent. Amazingly, just three years ago, Apple represented nearly half of devices being shipped to U.S. classrooms. So Google, supporting hardware that was cheap, won a big market battle vs. Apple and Microsoft in the classroom with an education console (marketed and branded by Dell, Samsung, Acer, HP, etc) very well received and that made it possible for IT administrators to manage profiles on individual devices or manage multiple students on one device.

Click here to learn what that has to do with Google vs. Amazon now.

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