CEDIA Expo celebrated its 20th anniversary at a new location, the Georgia World Congress Center, here, where despite lower attendance technologies such as home network connectivity, environmentally related products and new developments in video created excitement.
CEDIA reported that more than 20,000 attended the Expo, down 12 percent. Over 400 exhibitors, including 70 new companies, attended the show, compared with more than 500 exhibitors for CEDIA Expo in Denver last year.
Lower attendance was understandable given the economy, but a smaller audience did not cut back on the number of new technologies and products shown.
Many product introductions focused on home-network connectivity, retrofit installation, glitch-free distribution of HDMI video around the house, and green products, either touted as energy-efficient in themselves or enabling consumers to monitor and control the energy usage of their home HVAC systems or appliances.
In video, just some of the introductions included Sony’s line for the custom-install channel, Toshiba’s first Blu-ray Disc player, Sharp adding to its Blu-ray line, JVC deubting D-ILAs and LED LCD monitors, LG Electronics demonstrating new LED LCD displays, and Samsung introducing a 65-inch 1080p LCD.
Suppliers also continued to diversify their product offerings to capture a greater share of purchases by a shrinking number of installers. Among them were Proficient and SpeakerCraft, which showed their first home-theater receivers. SpeakerCraft also showed its first multi-room-A/V system, which will stream multiple HDCP-copy-protected 1080p streams over Category cable.
In networked products, Sherwood, Rotel, and NAD showed their first networked products, all of which stream content from a networked PC.
For its part, Pioneer demonstrated its Project Entertainment Tap concept technology, which copies and stores CD music on a hard drive, streams and downloads audio and video from authorized Web sites, and streams audio and video from a networked PC.
To tap the retrofit market during a period of depressed new-home construction, NuVo and Russound demonstrated their powerline-based multi-room-audio systems, and Crestron demonstrated its first home-control system to use RF wireless to transmit control signals.
To move copy-protected HDMI video throughout the house, AMX unveiled its first HDMI-distribution system, joining Crestron in the market. And a new HDMI-distribution brand, Spectrum Electronics Solutions, stepped up its marketing efforts with a distribution agreement with its first national distributor, Capitol Sales.
For complete coverage of CEDIA visit www.TWICE.com and check coverage throughout this issue and the Sept. 28 issue of TWICE.
