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Last weekend was the Consumer Electronics Show 2003, the annual show where companies reveal their plans for the year as well as some of the strangest prototypes imaginable. For instance, Phillips showed off a $1,700 remote control that allows Internet and e-mail access via its 6-inch screen and a wireless connection.

In fact, networking, and especially wireless networking, emerged as the largest trend for 2003’s show. In the next year, everything from our televisions to our car stereos will be able to be connected to a household network. This is happening as the line between what information comes into our family room and what flows into our computer room blurs.

The most promising application of wireless technology will be devices that allow digital media, especially music and pictures to be beamed (via Wi-Fi a.k.a. 802.11b – a standard in wireless transmission) to our family room. Companies such as Cd30, Rockford Fosgate, Hewlett Packard and Motorola all unveiled little networking boxes which connect to your home stereo and broadcast music from your PC to somewhere else in the house. There will also be boxes that connect directly to the Internet and stream music through pay services such as Phillips’ Streamium.   

Some other devices take the notion of streaming music into the family room one step further by adding pictures, video and Internet content to the list of capabilities. Sony, Pioneer and HP all unveiled products that link digital media from the PC to the family room with varying degrees of feature content and ease of operation.

After a few years on the market, TiVo has finally achieved a good deal of sales and has won some important battles in its legal struggle with the entertainment industry. To enhance the current line of digital video recorders, TiVo will be adding boxes that support HDTV, DirecTV reception, and most interestingly, wired and wireless networking options.

Dubbed the “Home Media Option,” it will allow various TiVo units in a house to share content with each other, as well as music, pictures and programming guides to be retrieved from your computer. The upgrade costs $99 plus the price of networking hardware, but it was the most exciting new product at CES. Apparently, the interface is very sleek and the thought of having high definition DirecTV reception and wireless connectivity with my PC makes my butt tingle with anticipation to sit down on the couch and never get up.

Trying, possibly, to one-up TiVo, Hy-Tek created a $6,000 LCD TV that has a computer built in. The 30-inch LCD TV is only 5 inches thick and uses a 2.5 GHz Pentium 4 processor and hard drive to allow digital video recording on the fly. The television can display video from any source and has a built-in DVD player.

Sonicblue, the maker of TiVo’s competitor ReplayTV has also gone the way of the network with its new GoVideo DVD player that can stream audio and video off of your PC. Best of all is the DVD player costs only $250 and includes the networking hardware.

Looking toward the future, major electronics manufacturers Sony and Matsushita (i.e. Panasonic) have joined together to develop a Linux-based operating system to serve as the backbone for numerous new networked products. The products are all designed to bring more content to our fingertips and make the process of watching television much more interactive. Instead of merely receiving content, Sony and others see the computer as a kind of slave that will allow us to acquire, sort, and edit content before beaming it over to our TVs.

I say, beam me up Sony! Take me into that great wireless unknown we call the future.

Robert’s got the flu right now. If you want to e-mail him some chicken soup for the techie soul try resposito@media.ucla.edu.