SkyBOX: Back From The Borg

[Gregg Lengling]

by Evie Haskell evie@Mediabiz.com

We went. We were assimilated. Shunted into long, long lines. Tagged by function. Processed through speeches, press conferences and mazes of booths. And spit back out.

In other words, we survived Los Vegas CES Borgdom. We couldn't call it fun. But we did pick up a number of interesting tidbits:

Dueling DARS: The fight between the DARS guys is getting rougher as XM CEO Hugh Panero took several shots at those other guys during his pre-opening press conference. Touting XM as "the big dog" (get it?) of satellite radio, Panero teed off on Sirius' Howard Stern signing, their NFL deal and their me-too technologies. Speaking of all that, we were promised some data on how potential new subscribers view the XM/Sirius options. (There's some controversy over which leads in preferences.) Never did get the data, but we did see some seriously cool new XM products. Our favorite: The XM2Go device produced by Tao. (Fabulous toy; fabulous new consumer electronics name.)

DISH versus DirecTV: In another hot spot satellite, DirecTV took this year's lead in all categories ... press conference, booth and new products. DirecTV President Mitch Stern (who's so press-shy we were wondering if he really exists) proved quite engaging and the new DirecTV interactive applications and programming are truly breathtaking. The most spectacular of many spectacular newbies idea: A Sunday Ticket based interactive "fantasy football" with interactive replays for aficionados of the fantasy game. (The most fun was watching DirecTV founder Eddy Hartenstein explain some of the new bells and whistles to a definitely unhappy contingent from CableLabs.)

There is, unfortunately, a downside to DirecTV's new interactive offerings: The company has a big, big legacy box problem to solve before they can roll it all out to their existing subscribers.

Such a problem does not dog DISH whose press conference was considerably more subdued and less well attended. (Well, it didn't serve lunch either.) Still the Echo crowd had some things to crow over. In our favorite, they've quite brilliantly hijacked the wired ones' VOD appellation (much to the horror of our cable friends). Echo's new "VOD" box comes armed with a mega-hard drive with 100 hours recording time devoted to programming downloaded from DISH (starting with popular movies) plus 100 hours for subscriber DVR recordings. Sounds to us like a pretty slick solution to one of the services that cable considers a big differentiator.