Western Show: Consumer Electronics Sans Consumers

Jim Barthold

The Western Cable Show, long a nirvana for the technology-oriented, is morphing into a consumer electronics showcase - without the consumers.

Many of the hot items on this year's show floor will be aimed, not at the cable operators who buy them, but at the consumers who will use them, and, perhaps eventually buy them.

"This is not a consumer show," emphasized Chuck Kaplan, GM of Philips Electronics Cable North America. "We have to prove that we are going to appeal and create interest from the consumer side, but the side we're really appealing to is the financial side. You think it's good business if we convince consumers to buy these boxes."

Although the show's focus is still primarily to get operators to buy equipment such as digital boxes, cable modems and home networking systems, it is the end user who will be the ultimate judge of a product's appeal. That will become more of the case as such projects as DOCSIS, OpenCable and PacketCable standardize products.

Consumers, though, won't get any previews this year.

"We ought to change that," suggested Dick Day, Motorola Inc.'s markets division VP/GM. "I think MSOs would get a good message, an excellent message if they would" let consumers take a look at the vendors' wares.

Motorola, he said, has an established consumer brand name to stamp on such products as cable modems and home networks - along with wired and wireless telephony devices that might or might not be linked into cable networks using high-speed broadband transport.

"I think that's one of the things that we see as a big opportunity for us, having relatively recently joined this industry, is that ... excitement we're bringing because of our focus on consumers," he said.

Motorola, he promised, will "show the ultimate Internet appliance at the show. What we're trying to do is focus some consumer excitement about the cable access, the Internet."

Even without consumers, Day knows there will be an audience for Motorola's "devices that go in the home and make content fun."

"In the final analysis," he said, "we're all consumers too."

This consumer orientation is not new, said Steve Necessary, Scientific-Atlanta Inc.'s marketing VP.

"I think the SCTE (Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers Cable Tec Expo) has been turned into more and more of a technology show. Therefore, the Western and National are the generalists' shows," he said. "Couple that with the consolidation among the U.S. cable operators and it's just not the technical forum that it once was."

Nevertheless, he was quick to emphasize, there is still enough technology to keep the technically minded happy at the Western Show.

"It's a 'What's in it for me?' show, meaning, what's in it for me as a cable operator or what's in it for me as a consumer," he said.

Even companies that would not, under the most generous circumstances, be considered consumer electronics firms are still interested in the consumer's view of the latest cable technology.

"It would be interesting to sort of test their reaction," agreed Paul Bosco, VP/GM-cable products and solutions at Cisco Systems Inc.

Bosco saw another target audience at the show: "new people coming into the industry who aren't just broadcast video people or broadcast video programming people, they're consumer entertainment people."

The show, he said, would maintain its technology perspective, but that focus will be aimed at a different audience.

"The engineering guys are changing to be multi-service in their thinking and broadband Internet in their vision," he said.

That vision is nearsighted, he emphasized.

"As we book appointments, very few people wanted to talk 'vision,'" he said. "Everybody wants to go to market. They're extending their existing market, building their existing network or they're trying to figure out how to launch initiatives."

Those networks will use standardized, interoperable products that will, again, somehow be placed into the hands of consumers.

"The industry is really moving down the track of allowing it to go from leased onto the retail shelves and then start adding advanced features that customers are willing to pay for," said Paul Pishal, Philips' product strategy director.

That strategy does not necessarily mean putting the products on the store shelves, either.

"I do not put all the solutions in the store," said Andy Chang, VP-business development for home networking provider NDC Communications Inc. "I cannot put all the broadband solutions in CompUSA. Broad-band to the retailer is still very new. They have a very different business model."

For that reason, Chang mixes e-commerce with his retail strategy, resulting in what he calls retail/e-commerce, "not just e-commerce but the consumer can also go to the retail store for a certain product that is also overlapping in the e-commerce site."

"It will piggyback back and forth," he said. "The retail store's presence is important for branding purposes. The consumer likes to feel it; they like to touch it."

While there will be more retailers on the show floor than consumers, they won't be in the majority, Day predicted.

"I think the show, in that regard, will again be disappointing in that the model is not emerging," he said. "I think we all inherently know - MSOs and manufacturers - that we need the assistance of the retailers eventually to win. I don't think that's quite there yet."

Even though the consumer electronics products those retailers would stock are ready for the public.

"On the consumer side, on the appliance side, there's an enabling dynamic taking place where we have a heavy blurring of products that have the quality of broadcast video, the interactivity of the PC and the dynamic rendering of a game player all coming together," said Cisco's Bosco.

"The cable operator of the future is this multi-service player connected with the consumer and dealing with each of these network appliances, each of these consumer products, as revenue-producing portals into a core set of cable-posted services," he continued. It is, he concluded, "a very cool time."