Panasonic Showers CES With Tech Tools

LAS VEGAS -- Panasonic is showing off its bag of technology tricks at the Consumer Electronics Show here. The company's top executive demonstrated several technologies during his keynote address, including a new networking technology that could soon shuttle data around the home or office at a nifty 170 megabits per second.

The technology uses an adapter that plugs into a wall outlet and converts data into a format that can be carried over standard power lines. It should be fast enough to send multiple streams of high-definition video to every room in the home, something not possible today, Panasonic officials say.

Called HD-PLC, for high-definition-ready high-speed power-line communication, the technology has been proposed to the HomePlug Power Alliance, an industry consortium, for adoption as part of its standard. If the consortium does adopt HD-PLC, Panasonic plans to begin selling products to customers in the second half of this year, the company says.

Connectivity Is Key

It was one of several technologies highlighted by Fumio Ohtsubo, president of Panasonic AVC Networks, in a speech at the start of CES. The ability to network consumer devices together--and to do so in a way that doesn't require users' wading through instruction manuals--will be key to the electronics industry in the future, he said.

"From now on, our industry's products must communicate with each other. They can provide more value by connecting to each other than they provide alone. That's how we now approach everything that we do" at Panasonic, he said.

The goal is to let people shoot video, take pictures, and download music, and then play back that content on any device, at work, at home, or even in the car. The vision, which Panasonic calls "Lifestream," draws heavily on SD (Secure Digital) storage cards, which a Panasonic official here says will reach 4GB by 2006. That's enough for more than 2 hours of DVD-quality video.

In contrast to the speech given here on Wednesday by Bill Gates, Microsoft's chair and chief software architect, Ohtsubo's presentation made no use of PCs. Consumers can take SD cards from their cameras, MP3 players, or camcorders and plug them directly into a DVD player or television to play back their files. The company is showing off flat-screen televisions that include SD slots.

"There's no need for booting up a PC or any other source device," Reid Sullivan, vice president of Panasonic's Entertainment Group, said during Ohtsubo's speech.

Sudden Shower

Ohtsubo surprised the audience by starting his presentation with a shower of water that poured like rain from the roof of the Hilton Theater into a large bowl before him. The idea was to show how electronics products can become as ubiquitous and affordable as water. In fact, he noted, some are already cheaper.

Ohtsubo said he was at a supermarket recently where calculators the size of credit cards were on sale for 99 cents. Two aisles over, bottles of Evian water were selling for $2. "Electronics is cheaper than water," he said, beaming happily.

The company also showed a prototype of a sleek, black high-definition camcorder not much larger than a pack of playing cards. The device will let consumers record top-quality video when it goes on sale by 2006. "This technology will revolutionize the camcorder market," Ohtsubo asserted.

Officials here also showed a digital video camera the size of a credit card and a futuristic television remote control that looks like a silver pen. The remote works in conjunction with a new interface for televisions--a rotating, graphical carousel--that is supposed to make it easier for people to select upcoming programs they want to record. No release date for the products was given.

See PC World's ongoing CES coverage.