CES Goes Hollywood in Las Vegas

The annual Consumer Electronics Show, usually the stomping ground of geeks, was a circus of stars as Comcast and Sony introduced their new wares

by Ron Grover

It was hard to miss the fact that Hollywood got star billing at the geekfest that is the annual Consumer Electronics Show. TV stars were everywhere in Las Vegas, and not behind velvet ropes. Vanna White warmed up the crowd at an invitation-only Sony (SNE) event. Alex Trebek waxed poetic about Jeopardy's online games, and Jerry Seinfeld, fronting for Sony's new online efforts, had 'em rolling in their folding chairs with gags about everything from his 80-year-old mother to Viagra ("Ever wonder why there's always a guy climbing a mountain in those ads? And call a doctor if the condition persists for four hours? Not before I know what he's gonna do to me!"). Kevin Costner was roaming the convention floor, and NBC's (GE) news elite, including both Brian Williams and Al Roker, were broadcasting from the show.

Even Brian Roberts, the chief executive of cable giant Comcast (CMCSA), who was delivering the first-ever keynote speech by a cable guy at the show, played straight man for American Idol host Ryan Seacrest. He fed Seacrest lines during a presentation at which Comcast unveiled several video initiatives, including Fancast, a new service that lets subscribers program their DVRs online or click through to watch TV shows on the Web. Roberts, looking a little lost, watched as Seacrest ad-libbed even while clips from Fancast filled the giant screen behind him. "He didn't say that stuff during rehearsals," Roberts told me afterwards.

Yes, the time has come: Media companies are grabbing the starring role in the world of bits and bytes. The two big winners at this year's show, at least from where I was sitting, were Sony and Comcast. O.K., Sony is hardly a newcomer to the CES doings. But for the first time, the company cleared some space to show off its new online sites from Hollywood studio Sony Pictures Entertainment alongside its flat-screen TV sets, PlayStations, and Blu-ray players.

Sony Gets the Big Buzz

That has been a long time in coming. For years, the media gods mostly watched from the sidelines as the likes of Apple's (AAPL) Steve Jobs, Microsoft's (MSFT) Bill Gates, and others crowded them from center stage with popular products that made the gizmo the belle of the consumer electronics ball.

Let's start with Sony. It was the buzz of the show even before the first booth had any floor traffic. That's because of the victory it won in the high-definition DVD format shootout by getting Warner Bros. to make its movies available on Blu-ray instead of the rival HD DVD. It helped, no doubt, that Sony controls the movie output of not only its own studio but also of MGM, where it is a 20% owner.

But it helped even more that Sony had rallied some other big studios to its side, including Fox (NWS) and Disney (DIS). At the Blu-ray cocktail party on Sunday night, barely dressed waitresses served—what else?—blue martinis. Earlier in the day, Sony Chief Executive Howard Stinger said, "We're feeling a little blue, and that's good." The next day he jokingly crossed himself and looked to the skies when I congratulated him on the announcement.

Comcast's Ready-Made Cable Audience

Could we finally be witnessing the fruits of the Hollywood acquisitions Sony made when it bought the Columbia Pictures studio from Coca-Cola (KO) in 1989? Maybe. But the Japanese electronics company was only warming up the CES crowd. It's making plans for an online content network, linking its Bravia TV set (which connects directly to the Internet) and its Internet-hugging PlayStation 3 game player to TV shows and movies as well as its Crackle.com video site, Game Show TV network, and FEARnet, a hybrid network and online site it launched with Comcast last year.