I've been giving tours of #CES for 10 years now, this is the first year that I'm not checking into a Vegas hotel today! One of the reasons I was brought in to give tours was to help separate things that would be trends from things I didn't think would be trends. While I've had a few misses over the years, I haven't done that badly. So, while most people are currently posting CES trends, I thought I would talk about some things that won't be trends, at least any time soon.
- 8K TV's. Truth be told, no one needs an 8K TV. The average consumer can see the difference be 1080 & 4K, but unless you're seeing the TV's side by side, you can't see difference between 4K and 8K. Secondly, while they certainly will come down in price, 8K TV's are still ridiculously expensive and without a compelling amount of content to watch on it, there's no consumer need. In fact, there's actually not much 4K content out there now. There's no reason to go beyond 4K. Thirdly, after spending billions in capex to upgrade all broadcast facilities to 4K, they're not spending the money to go to 8K. Especially being given that there's not a lot of 8K TV's to pump the content to. 8K and beyond is great for #OOH, but it will be the next consumer 3D.
- Self-driving cars. I have a teenager & believe me, I would love to have self driving cars, but we're at least a decade away from it happening. First, in order for it to really work, all cars need to be connected on same system. So, simple math: There are approximately 284.5 million vehicles registered in the US and we sell about 17 million a year. So it would take about 17 years to replace them all. Then, there's the entire ecosystem around cars today. For example, who does the insurance liability fall to? The consumer in the car? The car company that manufacturers the car? The self-driving AI software? It will take years just to answer that one question and there's are many others like that.
- Drone deliveries. If you follow me on Twitter, you know I'm not a big fan of drone deliveries. Sure, there are remote areas where delivery by drones might make sense, but it certainly doesn't make sense in suburban/urban areas. It's only real advantage is that it's cheaper than human delivery people.
- Slight improvements being touted as big deals. I've been giving tours for 10 years and year after year, we saw slight improvements. I even titled my 2019 review The Year of Being Incremental. Everything got slightly faster & smaller, more things got connected. Maybe missing this year will make next year feel like a real improvement.
- More Data, Less Help. There are lots of health & fitness tools out there helping me quantify, but not quantify. Sure, it can tell me I've met my step goal, but when will it help me adjust my goal because it's raining today? And how many ways do I need to track my sleep? I don't need more data, I need actionable plans!
I'm sure I'll add more throughout the week. So follow me to see what will be the real trends will be and what things everyone will talk about but will never really become a trend. LMK what you think!