Paul Gluckman

CTA wasted little time extolling the success of the virtual CES 2021 as having “made history as the largest digital tech event,” without disclosing data on attendance or user engagement. The event featured nearly 2,000 exhibitors and more than 100 hours of conference programming, said CTA Thursday, without mentioning that the vast majority of the content was prerecorded weeks ago. The physical CES 2020 event in Las Vegas drew about 4,400 exhibitors. “The all-digital CES 2021 engaged the global tech community to experience innovation, make connections and conduct business,” said CTA CEO Gary Shapiro. CES 2021 “showed how the pandemic accelerated the arc of innovation and illustrated the resilience and innovative spirit of our industry,” he said. Though Shapiro conceded last month that CTA had no way to independently audit virtual CES 2021 attendance, “the exhibitors will certainly have opinions whether the event has met their expectations or not,” he said then (see 2012170058). Thursday's announcement had no exhibitor testimonials.

Teladoc, claimed to be the oldest U.S. telemedicine platform, with roots dating to 2002, was “thrown a million curve balls” after the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March, CEO Jason Gorevic told a prerecorded CES 2021 workshop. “Overnight, literally our volume doubled,” and the availability of telehealth services became ubiquitous, he said. “We always thought this was inevitable. This wasn’t a surprise to us. We just didn’t think it was going to happen overnight and that it was going to take a global pandemic to be the catalyst for that.” Gorevic estimated Teladoc did more than 10 million “virtual visits” in 2020. Consumers went from the “awareness-building phase” of telemedicine “straight through to the adoption phase, into the expectation phase" in just "a matter of months,” he said. “That almost never happens.” Gorevic predicts that a year from now, consumers will look to virtual-care visits as “the destination for all of their healthcare needs, not just for a slice of their healthcare needs, and we’re already seeing that.” He estimates 60% of Teladoc visits are for “noninfectious diseases.”

NextGenTV can “evolve over time,” said ATSC President Madeleine Noland. “It’s not something that’s so static, like today’s television system.” ATSC 3.0's framers decided to “design it for 4K right now, knowing that we can upgrade to 8K basically at any time,” she told the virtual CES Tuesday. South Korean broadcasters recently started “field trials” delivering 8K over 3.0 using the existing H.265 video codec, she said. Noland predicted consumers who adopt NextGenTV will “get addicted” to the platform's HDR and wide color gamut capabilities. Executives also discussed 8K. Fox Sports used three 8K cameras when it televised Super Bowl LIV Feb. 2, said Michael Davies, senior vice president-field and technical operations. “It paled in comparison, somewhat, to the 102 other cameras we had, yet we did do the whole thing in HDR." Davies last visited Japan just before the pandemic, “and I was embarrassed to say we were still producing shows in 720p SDR,” he said. The Japanese "weren’t even talking about 4K at that point," he said. "They were talking about 8K.”

The Russian government-sponsored hack of SolarWinds Orion software used for network management systems (see 2012170050) prompted Microsoft President Brad Smith to use his prerecorded CES 2021 keynote Wednesday to urge tech industry action to write new cybersecurity “rules of the road.” World governments “have spied on each other for centuries,” said Smith. “But we’ve long lived in a world where there were norms and rules that created expectations about what was appropriate and what was not, and what happened with SolarWinds was not.” The breach amounted to a “mass, indiscriminate global assault on the technology supply chain that all of us are responsible for protecting,” said Smith. The attack distributed 18,000 “packages” of malware on network infrastructures globally, he said. “It is a danger that the world cannot afford.” The tech industry needs to use “our collective voice to say to every government around the world that this kind of supply chain disruption is not something that any government or any company should be allowed to pursue,” he said. “I hope we’ll come out of this CES and move forward with this as one of our clarion calls for the future.”

Qualcomm Technologies saw a 5G “acceleration across the board” in 2020, said Alejandro Holcman, senior vice president-engineering, in a prerecorded CES 2021 workshop streamed Wednesday. Qualcomm estimates that more than 100 network operators worldwide have “commercially deployed” 5G, he said. Hundreds of smartphone OEMs introduced 5G products, and shipments exceeded 200 million devices, he said. Though the pandemic made 2020 a “very challenging year, things are happening,” and there’s “no sign of a slowdown” in 5G, he said. The rollout is “still in the early stages,” said Holcman, and he thinks the 5G story of 2021 will be “expansion of coverage.” Consumers who buy 5G smartphones aren’t happy when they can’t find a 5G signal, he said. “Some of these things take time,” as they did during earlier wireless transitions, he said. Some higher 5G bands have “lower propagation” than the existing 4G service, he said. Building coverage “requires additional sites, and that takes time -- it’s more complex, you need permits,” he said. “But in 2021, I’m pretty hopeful that everybody’s going to be able to experience the 5G signal that they should get.”

The U.S. “is finding unity on a number of major tech issues,” said CTA President Gary Shapiro. Democrats and Republicans agree with the American public “that we need high-speed broadband in our homes,” he told the first virtual CES this week. “We must accelerate 5G deployment and extend broadband to underserved urban and rural areas. Our use of digital health technology has skyrocketed during the pandemic. We must keep the momentum going by removing unneeded and outmoded rules.”

CTA forecasts that the consumer tech industry will ship 800,000 NextGenTV sets this year, for 167% growth from 2020's 300,000 units, Vice President-Research Steve Koenig told a live ATSC webinar. It projects 12 million ATSC 3.0-compatible sets will be shipped in 2024, for 31% of all TV unit volume, he said.

Sony Semiconductor Solutions of America created a lip-reading technology designed to take voice recognition in vehicles “to the next level,” said Mark Hanson, vice president-technology and business innovation, at a CES 2021 media virtual briefing Tuesday. “Voice recognition continues to be one of the most reported complaints of new vehicle owners,” said Hanson. “Cars are dynamic and noisy” in conditions where audio voice recognition “is challenged,” he said. “The goal we gave the engineering team was to make voice recognition work in a convertible, figuring it they could make it work there, they could make it work in any environment.” Sony’s “current focus” is to support the company’s Vision-S electric car initiative, which could “help people with hearing impairment,” said Hanson. The technology supports more than 200 “command words” in English, he said. “We plan to expand both the word count and language support, prioritized on the needs of our customers.”

As 200 CEOs opposed the possible U.S. tariffs on Vietnamese goods, newly released November Census Bureau import statistics show Vietnam’s growing role in consumer tech. Vietnam as a sourcing country made substantial share gains the past year in product categories experiencing historic spikes in consumer demand during the COVID-19 pandemic, we found. It's most notable in smaller TV screens. U.S. importers also sourced about a fifth of smartphones from Vietnam in the year through November. Smartphone imports to the U.S. from all countries reached 21.44 million, up 1.6% from 2019. Chinese smartphone imports to the U.S. were 18.28 million, up 18%. The average such phone, at $367.30, was 27% more expensive. Vietnam shipped 2.6 million smartphones here in November, down 43%. The average at $187.87 was 24% more expensive. Tariffs on Vietnam aren't the answer to curb Hanoi's allegedly unfair devaluation of the dong against the dollar, wrote CEOs of LG, Samsung, Sony, CTA, the Computer & Communications Industry Association, Information Technology Industry Council, Internet Association and Semiconductor Industry Association and others to President Donald Trump Thursday, posted Friday in docket USTR-2020-0037. Their letter reflects widespread fear the Trump administration will rush through a Federal Register notice imposing tariffs on Vietnam, even if the duties take effect after Jan. 20. The White House didn't comment Monday.

Mobileye crossed a “threshold” and can build high-definition autonomous-vehicle (AV) maps, said CEO Amnon Shashua, senior vice president of its Intel parent. “We’re basically mapping the world, all automatically, everything done in the cloud.” It plans deployments in Detroit, Paris and Tokyo, he told a CES media briefing. “If we figure out how” to land regulatory OK, Mobileye will “deploy” in New York City in months, he said Monday. New York State Department of Transportation officials didn’t respond to questions. Self-driving robotaxis will be “somewhat of a game-changer when they become ubiquitous,” said Shashua. “Removing the driver from the equation could reduce the cost of transportation considerably, even rivaling the cost of public transportation.” He thinks affordable consumer AVs at scale with Level 4 autonomy -- one notch down from full autonomy -- are possible in 2025: “We’ll have a number of years of practicing from a regulatory point of view. Regulation is critical here. It’s difficult to leap directly to a consumer level from a regulatory point of view. Going through a regulation of a fleet is much easier.”