Voice assistants dominated this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. But what really matters for media companies, says the DPP in its Survey Report: CES 2018, is that the show included televisions equipped with voice search for content.

The DPP reports each year from CES – the world’s biggest trade show. The report reveals the latest technology trends, and what they mean for the media sector. Uniquely, the report also sets the trends in the context of previous CES shows going back to 2010.

“Our ability to set CES in a longer term context, enables us to separate the really significant developments from the hype cycles,” says Mark Harrison. “This insight means that each year we are able to predict what we’ll see at the next show – and we were almost completely right again this year.”

The DPP has been charting the rise of the major platforms – Google, Amazon and Apple – in recent years and how they have developed an increasingly intimate relationship with consumers. It has also been predicting that voice search will have a profound impact on the way content is made, distributed and consumed – and the media supply chain required to meet that demand.

The DPP Survey Report: CES 2018 highlights six major themes from this year’s show:

• Voice is red hot again – Voice dominated CES 2017, but this time it was Google, not Amazon, shouting from the roof tops
• Search has found its voice – Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa are being integrated with TV displays – and they look set to change the media industry for ever
• Taking care of business – this was the show where B2B outweighed B2C, as many companies left the relationship with the consumer to the tech giants, and focused on specific business opportunities
• A gadget show without gadgets – one effect of this focus on business to business products was that new consumer products from the major manufacturers were strangely thin on ground at CES 2018
• The Chinese are coming – and they’re bringing quality and innovation. The most likely competitors for Google, Amazon and Apple look set to be their Chinese equivalents, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent.
• A robot on my desktop – this is the show when the home robot became a reality – but as tool for the workshop, not the living room

“Many will see CES as rather downbeat this year,” says Harrison. “But in our experience these less glitzy years often mark a major turning point. I believe 2018 will come to be seen as the year the global platforms became truly integral to both our personal and work lives – and to how we discover and access content.’

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