CES: This Year, It's The Consumer Experience Show

“CES has outgrown its name,” Hasker said in an interview with FORBES last week. “Rather than being a conference on consumer appliances, it’s become a show about consumer experience..” His basic thesis: the success of any particular device is predicated on the experience provides through apps and contents rather than device features.
In other words, you can’t just produce technically astonishing devices: success or failure depends on giving consumers the ability to watch great content and run useful applications.
Social integration

Steve Hasker: It's about the experience.

Hasker thinks the integration of social media into consumer device experiences could be the single biggest trend at CES 2012. He sees social media as providing both disruption and compliment to audio and video content. Facebook, Twitter, Weibo, Orkut – all in various ways are pushing the social media experience into the video and audio content sector. In some ways, he says, the social sites stand to disrupt the profit pools available to the content providers.
“We prefer to choose our audio and video based on what our friends are recommending, rather than that which is pushed on us or we randomly discover ourselves,” he contends. With 800 million people on Facebook alone, and millions more on other social sites, he says, there’s a resource in place to allow people to get recommendations from peers “on a massive scale.”
Hasker’s view is that all of this will end up being good news for owners of premium content. “We’d argue that we are in the golden age of content,” he says. “There’s been an explosion of devices and viewing occasions.” He notes that the number of hours people spend watching video content is increasing – and that socially enabling content will further the trend.
And he thinks that there will be good alternatives for content owners to monetize their stuff. He expects a range of business models to emerge. “Major markets and CMOs have woken up to social media,” he says. “You can see that in Facebook’s advertising numbers. But also increasingly iTunes has taught us to seamlessly pay for content we like.”
Hasker is a little more bullish on the emergence of a la carte models over the all-you-can-eat approached offered by subscription services like Netflix. In the case of Netflix, he says, there are “a relatively small number of people consuming a lot of the content.”