MediaTalk | Season 3 | Ep. 3 - Biggest takeaways from CES 2025

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Mike Reynolds: Hi, I'm Mike Reynolds, a senior reporter covering the media industry with S&P Global Market Intelligence tech, media and telecom news team. Welcome to "MediaTalk," a podcast hosted by S&P Global, wherein the news and research staff explore issues in the ever-evolving media landscape. Today, I'm joined by S&P Global Market Intelligence, Kagan analyst, Neil Barbour, who is part of the consumer technology team with an eye toward video games, connected devices, and streaming operating systems. My TMT colleague, Stefan Modrich, our Washington DC-based technology policy reporter, is also with us. Both Neil, who made his fifth trip, and Stefan on his rookie run, just came back from CES, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. They're going to share some of their thoughts and findings. How are we doing, guys?

Neil Barbour: Yeah, super good. Thanks for having us on, Mike.

Stefan Modrich: Yeah, doing well, Mike. Looking forward to it.

Reynolds: All right. Guys, you made it back from Sin City. I know it's been a tough month for some of the sports betting operators. How did the Vegas casinos fare with you two? Stefan, you guys are all good. No money lost at the casinos.

Modrich: Yeah, I'm retired from sports betting.

Reynolds: And Neil, five trips in, better as well.

Barbour: Yeah, I did not spend much time at the casinos this year. In fact, one of my speculative takeaways is that there seem to be more late-night industry events, which took up a lot of my otherwise disposable time bank. Maybe CES is starting to wake up from the COVID years a little bit. But I will say I did have a fairly good run with the dice on my last few hours in town there.

Reynolds: All right. Very good. The other thing I wanted to ask you guys is about the Jimmy Dolan Sphere. Did you guys get a look at it either from the outside or inside while you're out there?

Barbour: Yeah, unfortunately not for me, but the sphere is becoming a big part of CES. Last year, Ernst and Young did a big presentation in there. I heard that Delta was in there this year with a lot of the immersive bells and whistles. Even if you're not in there yourself or seeing it a ton, you're definitely hearing about it a lot.

Modrich: Yeah, as Neil mentioned, Delta had their keynote in there this year, and I actually had a pretty nice view of it out of my window along with the Ferris wheel out there. It was definitely entertaining. Although I didn't spend much time up there.

Reynolds: Stefan, 2024 is a big year for NVIDIA, starting off 2025 with a big announcement in Vegas. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Modrich: Yeah. Of course, everyone knows this is a huge year for AI. And in order to keep up with this unprecedented demand, Nvidia CEO Jensen Wong unveiled its new rack scale architecture, the GB200 NVL72 processor, which is the sort of thing you would see if you're the Amazon.com Inc.'s or Google LLC's world, and you've got some of these large-scale data centers that are housing all that critical AI processing data. It's expected to deliver 30 times faster real-time performance for those large language models, which are your ChatGPTs and such of the world. So that's quite an interesting development, and we'll see how that translates.

Reynolds: All right, Neil. I think you said it was a big year for smart glasses out at CES. I'm just wondering, this has been going on for a while. Are they ready to break through, or are we still in the incipient stages here?

Barbour: So the AR/VR story has a really long tail, right? We've been through the headset phase, and that's still the primary bread and butter of a lot of these companies. But we're moving on to manufacturers making lightweight eyeglass frames with embedded displays translucently put on eyeglass lenses that the kind you might already be wearing right now. We spoke to no fewer than five vendors that were ready to go to market or already in the market with such a model. Most of these are coming from startups such as the Even Realities' G1, which weighs less than 40 grams. That's just a tick heavier than normal eyeglasses. Rokid Inc., XREAL, Halliday, RayNeo — those were some of the other companies with products that we tried. The smallest, most practical frame designs tended to be limited to heads-up displays that basically put your phone's notifications into your lenses. But if you're willing to put up with bulkier form factors, now we're sliding toward 80 grams, 100 grams, double the weight of a normal pair of eyeglasses. And sometimes, permanently shaded eyeglass lenses to help with image quality. You could get a full-color image of streaming video, for instance. Of course, there are battery life trade-offs with those kinds of models as well.

Reynolds: You took time with five companies, but I think you said the Even Realities was the one that caught your eye more than others, so to speak.

Barbour: Yeah, that's right. And again, that's more of the heads-up display. So they'll pair with your phone. You could get turn-by-turn directions put right into your eyeglasses. A lot of these companies also, and Even Realities is one such where you could link a large language model to the glasses, or at least access the large language model by tapping the frames and saying, "How do I get directions to this place?" or "What does my calendar look like today?" giving it natural language inquiries and then being able to access that data and spit it back at you.

Reynolds: It's gonna get that information mode going. That's cool. For those who want to find out more about what Neil, as he made the rounds with the glasses out at CES, he's got a good piece that you could find on our website entitled "Smart glasses enter the product phase at CES 2025." So for those interested, please check that out. Stefan, we all have more devices that seemingly every day. We hope they don't break. If they do, we bring them back to the vendor or whatever, go to the store, send them out for repair. One company out at CES was showcasing some repair kits for our devices.

Modrich: Yeah, that's right, Mike. This company iFixit has been a pretty reliable name in this repair space for a while. They've also been pretty active on the advocacy and policy front, which is interesting in that, to your point, we're always having different gadgets with various life cycles and repair needs. And they came onto the scene with some of these repair kits that were useful for more kind of DIY laptop repairs. Okay. But there's also a new gadget that they were showcasing, which is this smart soldering iron, which has a 100-watt USB-C power station. I watched them demo it in front of me, and it was able to heat up in under five seconds. But you can also charge it with a laptop. But yeah, I think another kind of interesting story to continue to follow in light of this is that there are certainly movements in the other direction where companies would prefer you to have things repaired directly through them. And iFixit is among these advocates for independent repair shops, a lot of whom have had to turn away customers because they have certain restrictions with the products that they've owned. Massachusetts, Colorado, and New York are some of the states where they've had right-to-repair laws passed. Of course, the EU is also further along in that. So it could be something to watch in 2025 and beyond.

Reynolds: Interesting. I guess in addition to devices, healthcare seems to be very prominent this time around. So a couple of products that you looked at or wore, as the case may be, and very interesting to you, Stefan.

Modrich: Yeah, so the one that I'll start with is a very well-known name in the healthcare space, the medical and bioscience lab space, Abbott Laboratories. And that's a Chicago-based company, which has made a lot of biometric sensors and lab kits in the past. They have this tool called the continuous glucose monitor now, and it's called Lingo. And it's essentially a sensor that's probably no bigger than a nickel or a dime. You make a slight prick of your skin, wear it on your shoulder, and it can be worn throughout the day or while you're doing physical activity, like running or going to the gym. And the idea is that it's supposed to provide you real-time glucose and metabolic data that can help you understand your diet better and your performance and try to optimize your routine and your sleep habits. This is this trend that I've been seeing for a while, where you're seeing a lot more consumer tech, a lot more health tech become more consumer-friendly, and then a lot of wearable devices, including smartwatches and smartphones, which are also going the health-conscious or medical device route. So you're seeing them meet in the middle there.

Reynolds: The other product that I think you'll want to talk about is one that will help us all optimize whether we're sedentary or athletic and moving. It's a nasal dilator or to that effect.

Modrich: That's right. And this is one that I actually had the chance to wear, and this is from a company called Intake Breathing. And yeah, I talked to a few people behind their table there. And it was quite popular; I was definitely surprised to see how many people wanted to check this one out. But then once I tried it, it was pretty clear why. So essentially, you apply on each side of the bridge of your nose a little bandage-sized adhesive. And then, on top of that, you apply that dilator, and it opens up the passages in your nose. And whether you have some respiratory ailment or not officially diagnosed, it's just designed to help everybody breathe more freely through their nose. You don't require a prescription for it. There's not a direct medical utility for it. But I found it to be pretty interesting, and we'll see how tech like that continues to evolve.

Reynolds: Cool. We've mentioned AI only a little bit, which is surprising given its prevalence. But Neil, there was a major push for AI being the centerpiece for many in our living rooms with the upcoming rounds of smart TVs.

Barbour: Yeah, I think so. So if you go to LG Electronics Inc. or Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. or any of the big gizmo makers at CES, over the years they're bound to show you a lot of smart home stuff. I'm talking about thermostats, refrigerators, washing machines, all linked together and working together in different ways around the house, right? Talking to each other, sharing data, alerting you to what's going on with them. But the issue has been how to control and monitor these devices. You have to wade through menus on your phone or try to give them voice commands that they might not understand. So what AI does, and this is a big focus this year, is to allow you to talk naturally to these devices. Like I was talking about the smart glasses, you can give it commands that are outside of a preset vocabulary. So think about saying, "Hey, refrigerator, do we have enough milk?" Or maybe you have a tracker on your dog, and you could say, "Hey, Siri, has the dog been walked today?" And it'll look at the data. It'll notice how far it's walked or if it went around the block or something like that and say, "It hasn't been on a walk," or "It hasn't been on a very good walk." So the idea is that the smart home data becomes easier to interface with as it incorporates these large and small language models.

So the other interesting twist — and that's the thing that you were alluding to in the question, right — is that the same gizmo manufacturers are also leading TV manufacturers. So they see that potential synergy. So you come into the living room, and the TV maybe has a sensor on it, not a camera, but maybe a sensor, maybe a camera. And it'll pull up these widgets. One's a feed from your doorbell camera. One shows you that your laundry is still in the rinse cycle, something along those lines. But you still want to watch the game. So you tell it what team you want to watch, and it finds the right streaming service, and maybe it turns the smart lights down in your living room, and you notice the score is already seven to two. And you say, "I've got to see that safety rewind. I want to see that sack in the end zone." It'll take you right to there. So those are the kinds of conveniences you can get from a smart home that has a little AI muscle. A lot of those demonstrations were talking points, or they would guide you through it to make sure nothing would go wrong. Sometimes you chalk that up to the Wi-Fi being bad on the show floor or it's loud on the show floor, so it's hard to get those voice commands to work. But it does feel like maybe the real time for a lot of this AI smart home magic is maybe next year. They reflected on the previous year. They say, "Okay, what can we do with these large language models? Let's get cracking," and then the fit and finish is just going to take a little longer.

Reynolds: Yeah. I was going to ask you if this was going to be ready for the fall or for next Super Bowl or what have you — not 2025, but 2026.

Barbour: Yeah, I think what you'll see in the near term are existing streaming operating systems like Google TV... and Samsung. Hisense is doing a little bit. You'll see updates where the large language models, the "show me movies with robots in it," that'll get better. Amazon Fire TV has already made a show of doing a little bit of that, and then the broader smart home stuff. You know that there's some interoperability problems still to be solved. And yeah, that's a longer-term goal.

Reynolds: Okay, I guess if you went back a few years ago, we talked about TV in the Netflix Inc. realm; there wasn't going to be any advertising, but that has changed. And advertising has now become a more prominent component at CES. Comcast Corp./NBCUniversal Media LLC announced Universal Ads. It's a one-stop ad platform that's going to bring together premium inventory from NBCU, A&E (US), AMC Networks Inc., DIRECTV Entertainment Holdings LLC, Fox Corp., Paramount Global, Roku Inc., Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. and Xumo. So that's going on. Mark Marshall, who's the head of NBCU ad sales, he was talking that they're already looking to try to sell Super Bowl inventory for not this year's game, but the 2026 game. Disney, meanwhile, held its Global Tech and Data Showcase at CES, and they talked about how we're going to get more customized and personal ads as we watch streaming games, whether it's on ESPN+ or better still, when ESPN flagship launches. They also talked about Magic Words, which is a contextual advertising capability where advertisers through programmatic are able to get more pertinent messages against emotions, keywords, those kinds of scenes.

Anyway, Neil, that being said, there was a lot of AI integration from what you saw out there from other advertising companies or from other manufacturers out at CES.

Barbour: So we talked to a few stakeholders on and off the floor, and they're looking for what you're talking about, where are the new ad vectors where the eyeballs are going. And so that's integrated apps with video and maybe the gambling and the video gaming all in one place that you could potentially put better inventory around. Maybe with all of those activities going on in one app, you're not necessarily needing apps to track across the ecosystem that you know a lot about a consumer just by their behavior in one app. And perhaps that's AI-assisted down the road. There's also ad-supported cloud gaming services like putting inventory on platforms like Amazon Luna, Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox Game Pass. And then there's also a lot of talk about just these new screens, the AR/VR headsets and smart glasses. Maybe the mass market isn't there, but even right now, this could be a way to tap into wealthier early adopters. There's already a lot of streaming video on the Quest 3 and Apple Inc. Vision Pro, and there are metaverse platforms like Roblox that are getting really serious about building a lot of advertising opportunities in 3D virtual spaces. But yeah, sitting on top of all of that is the AI component, making programmatic that much sharper.

Reynolds: Interesting. And again, relevance, early adopters, regardless of the platform, you can't get away from ads. So they've been saying for 70 years. Stefan, I guess countries and cities also put themselves on display and their technological capabilities. So a lot of that going on at CES as well.

Modrich: No doubt. One in particular that I had the chance to connect with was a delegation from the South Korean city of Incheon, and essentially their pitch to the rest of the world is centering themselves around being a hub for semiconductor production, a hub for biotech and also showcasing and branding themselves as a smart city. Essentially, the urban infrastructure equivalent to a lot of the smart home things that Neil was alluding to earlier. But instead, maybe applied to timing for pedestrian crosswalks or other traffic signals or ways to reduce waste in things like water infrastructure or power and heat and things like that. And that is definitely one area of emphasis for them. Similarly, the city of Phoenix, who I had a chance to chat with Mayor Kate Gallego, she told me they had a dinner with the folks from South Korea and that the business relationship between several South Korean companies and the city of Phoenix and the state of Arizona has definitely blossomed over the last few years. And that's because they've had similar mindsets in terms of wanting to anchor themselves around this sort of AI revolution and the infrastructure needed to support it, with Arizona, of course, being a hub for TSMC and other semiconductor production.

Reynolds: So you also got a chance to visit your alma mater at Arizona State University. Sorry about the [Sun] Devils' loss to the Texas Longhorns in the CFP, Stefan, but so you were down there as well.

Modrich: I was indeed; I was also at the game in Atlanta. But yes, I did get out to Tempe to tour a facility called the MacroTechnology Works lab. This is really a very coordinated effort between the public and private sectors in the sense that this facility is also home to many major producers across the semiconductor supply chain, including Applied Materials Inc., ASML Holding NV and many others who have opted into not only renting the space because it can be very economical to do so when you have access to these specialized clean rooms and chemicals that are not easily accessible. This is not the kind of work that you're doing out of your garage like Steve Jobs back in the day. So this is really a very fine-tuned and precision environment where you know everything is very closely guarded but at the same time, also very collaborative between the research institutions and the companies that have opted into this agreement of investing in the research as well as getting the opportunity to showcase some of these semiconductor packaging prototypes. The CEO of the company Deca Technologies Inc., which is one of the anchor companies at this facility, was kind enough to share some of his time and insights with me as well. And it's been likened to a Manhattan Project for chips. They're banking on that CHIPS Act funding and that level of investment and commitment to continue.

Reynolds: Big doings in Tempe. Very cool. We'll get to the end here, guys. Going back to DC here, new administration, second round of Donald Trump in the White House. Evidently, Elon Musk has the 47th president's ear. Stefan, there was a panel that talked about big tech and government out at CES that you attended?

Modrich: Yes, definitely. Even the Consumer Electronics Show would not be complete without a panel about the spirited debate about the scope and size of government and its involvement in the tech industry. That's exactly what took place. There were folks from the Consumer Tech Association as well as from Y Combinator, the OG of seed funds or startup incubators. Then, various center-left and right policy wonks who discussed everything from antitrust policy to the uncertainty that overhangs the incoming Trump administration. So it was definitely an interesting discussion and lots more to be said in the coming months.

Reynolds: All right, Neil, last word to you. Your sensibilities about where Big Tech may stand amid a now GOP-led administration?

Barbour: Yeah, I hate to pull out such a cop-out, but I think it's probably still too early to tell. There's likely a regulatory angle here around M&A where vertical integration might get a little less scrutiny. Certainly, there are questions around generative AI that need to be worked out. I guess you see a lot of companies maybe going through a corporate culture realignment. A lot of this stuff is moving really fast, and it's not clear that the answer to everyone's questions fits into neat political heuristics.

Reynolds: Yeah, a lot to digest, guys. I wanted to thank you for spending some time with me talking about your CES adventures and say thanks to our guests, Stefan Modrich and Neil Barbour.

Barbour and Modrich: Thanks, Mike. Thank you, Mike.

Reynolds: And this is Mike Reynolds. Thanks to all of you for listening. We'll catch up soon on the next episode of "MediaTalk."