Who Goes To CES?

itwbennett writes "The Consumer Electronics Association stopped letting actual consumers attend the gadget extravaganza years ago, but even so, plenty of attendees can't exactly be described 'industry affiliates'. IDG News Service turned up a motorcycle stuntman, a restorer of 8-track tapes, and a lot of folks who were there just for fun."

same as e3

[bhcompy]

It's the same thing that E3 devolved into, really. A big dog and pony show with 50% the population of attendees made up of people that shouldn't be there, 49% made up of press and pseudopress bloggers, and 1% made up of people that should actually be there.

Past attendee

[khellendros1984]

I went in 2007 as an unemployed student. A group of us printed business cards labelled with our Computer Science club's name, made up positions for everyone, and drove to Vegas. Most of the others got "engineering" badges. I think it was required for at least one "sales" person to go...and I ended up with that badge.

NAB is better

[soundguy]

CES is mainly a bunch of useless consumer crap. The high end of that market, plus all the professional gear is at NAB. It's the same megavendors and the display spaces are almost identical for both shows, but NAB has much cooler stuff on display.

Re:NAB is better

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod GP up.

That list the parent linked is a who's fucking who of the content creation and distribution industry. Players like Sony, Panasonic, JVC, Canon, RED, Avid, Christie, Grass Valley, etc. These guys make the cameras that capture and record the content. They make the post-production systems that edit and finish it. They make the high-end displays and broadcast monitors that common televisions that you see at CES are derived from.

Without the content generation industry and the $BIG BUCKS$ behind it, simple consumer gear that you see at CES would be mostly irrelevant.

Remember that the "customers" at NAB are people like NBC, CBS, BBC, CNN, etc, and their affiliate stations, and the gear they buy and the money they are willing to spend on quality equipment dwarves the cheap crap that ends up in a consumer's home for bargain basement prices. And by "quality equipment", I mean things like remote HD cameras with helicopter mounts for the local traffic/news channel that will broadcast live via satellite to a terrestrial broadcast station. Real expensive shit.

Like the GP said, much cooler stuff on display.