CES: And the twain shall meet?

The Consumer Electronics Show this year seemed all about bigger and better home video services and devices, and smaller video that can go mobile.

Neither Verizon nor AT&T made as big of a splash at the’08 CES as they did in 2005 and 2007, but Comcast stepped up with a major announcement.

All of this begs an important question: Will consumer device makers be partners or competitors to the service provider industry? I suspect the answer is yes.

There are two distinctly different approaches to delivering advanced services to businesses and consumers. One involves integration of the services, applications and devices -- think wireless service as it is delivered today in the U.S. The other involves open networks, standard interfaces and lots of choices -- think of television as it originally was delivered. Consumers bought a TV, took it home, plugged it in and manipulated the rabbit ears to see what channels they could get.

There are those in the industry who think we are headed toward the latter scenario –Level 3’s James Crowe, for one -- but telcos getting into video services and the cable industry are both leaning heavily in the other direction, and betting billions on the idea that their video services will be closely tied to the set-top boxes that go into consumers’ homes and the networks that connects those STBs to the video infrastructure they have built.

When NetFlix teams with LG to deliver streaming IP video directly to a TV, that’s not an open network approach. When Apple introduces its many and varied services, they include the device as well as the service.

But with everything moving to IP, it only seems a matter of time before IP appliances are developed that are not network-specific or provider-specific. It will be interesting to see how business models change if this happens.

E-mail me at choward@telephonyonline.com.