I am nearing completion of my first day of my first-ever CES. It turns out that everyone who said that this thing was huge really wasn’t exaggerating. Who knew?
Anyway, once I got over my in initial shock at the sheer size of this place I began to work my way through the crowds to meet with a variety of companies. As some regular readers might be aware, a majority of my coverage is of the accessories category. At this show I’m focusing a lot of my attention on remotes, mounts and other home-theater-related technologies.
I realize that it’s very early in the show, but one of the things that I’m picking up on is that lighting is likely going to become a bigger player in the home theater market in the near future. A conversation with HTSA’s Richard Glikes on Sunday night indicated that he thought that the members of his buying group would likely benefit from paying more attention to integrating lighting services into their custom installation offerings.
Even more interesting, after spending a day meeting with a variety of manufacturers, is what appears to be an emerging trend of introducing lighting products and accessories for whole-home and home theater lighting systems that are targeted at consumers — many which can be installed by the consumer himself. This self-installation is slowly bringing down the price of implementing these kinds of systems into the home and in turn will likely yield more mainstream integration of controlled lighting systems in American homes.
It may be too early to tell how big this is going to be in the mainstream market, but I plan on keeping an eye on it and perhaps you should too.
