CES wrapped up in Vegas today and my Twitter feed has been an absolute mess of it since Tuesday. I didn't go — I never go, it's not that kind of blog — but between the liveblogs and the endless "here's what caught our eye" posts I feel like I sat through all four days anyway, minus the free swag and the blisters.
The one actual, real-world-consequences story out of the show this week is Dish's Sling TV. They announced it Monday, ahead of the show floor even opening, and it's the first time I've seen a cable company (well, satellite company, but same idea) admit out loud that cord-cutting isn't a fringe thing anymore. Twenty bucks a month, streaming, and (this is the part that matters) it comes with ESPN. That's the whole ballgame right there. Every other "TV over the internet" pitch for the last few years has been missing live sports, and live sports is the actual reason half the country still pays for a cable box they hate. I don't know yet if the rest of the channel lineup is any good (rumors are it's thin, a dozen-ish channels to start), but getting ESPN unbundled from a $100 cable package is a genuinely new thing happening, not just a press release.
Everything else out of CES this week is, honestly, kind of a parade of stuff nobody asked for. I say this with real affection, because I love a dumb gadget as much as anyone. But we've hit a point where "connected" gets bolted onto literally anything with a battery in it. There's a toothbrush now (a French company called Kolibree) that syncs to your phone and tracks your brushing habits so an app can tell you you're doing it wrong. There's a belt (Belty, also French, I'm noticing a pattern) that loosens itself automatically when you sit down and, I guess, tightens back up when it senses you've eaten too much. I don't want my belt to have opinions about my lunch. I really don't.
And then there's Rocket Skates, which are exactly what they sound like: motorized skates built by a couple of ex-NASA and ex-SpaceX engineers, and they will apparently do about 12 miles an hour off a battery pack strapped to your ankle. This is the one CES gadget this year I'd actually consider buying if I had $600 sitting around and zero regard for my own kneecaps. Every other smart-whatever at the show is trying to optimize something that didn't need optimizing. Rocket Skates just wants you to go fast and maybe eat pavement. I respect the honesty.
Samsung's big push this year was SUHD TVs, which is a marketing term I refuse to pretend I understand the difference between and 4K, and LG's doing webOS 2.0 on their new TV lineup, which (fine, sure, TVs are TVs) I'll believe it's better when I'm standing in a Best Buy comparing it to last year's model under those terrible fluorescent lights that make every screen look identical anyway.
Intel's keynote Tuesday was the one thing out of the actual show I wish I'd seen live instead of through a recap. Brian Krzanich showed off this tiny module called Curie, button-sized, meant to go into wearables, and there was a drone on stage doing obstacle avoidance on its own, which is the first time I've seen that demoed outside of a research video. Little chips like Curie are the part of CES that actually ships into products I'll be writing about a year from now, versus the smart belts that show up in one CES roundup and then vanish forever. I've watched enough of these shows at this point (this blog's been going over three years now, believe it or not) to know which pile something like Curie ends up in.
My coffee maker broke this morning, incidentally, in the middle of me reading all this, the kind of low-tech, zero-connectivity failure that no CES booth is solving. I stood there holding a filter, no coffee, reading about a belt that knows when I'm full. There's a joke in there somewhere and I'm too under-caffeinated to find it.