Toy Story: For Adults it’s CES

The holidays mean toys for children. Toys in those big catalogs that weigh down mail carriers even in this age of Web-enabled shopping; toys clogging the aisles of the stores and malls; and toys on television. It’s toys to the world.

After the holidays, after those toys are broken or discarded into some dusty closet corner, it’s toys for adults… aka the Consumer Electronics Show. For the select few of us who are invited to attend — or in my case, work CES — it’s a sometimes fantasy-driven winter wonderland that’s aptly staged in the unreal world of Las Vegas. Where else, for instance, can you see Ryan Seacrest and Brian Roberts on the same stage? Where else can you see 360-degree television?

CES, admittedly, is sometimes like the hidden underbelly of the kids’ holiday toy blitz. Like those trucks that climb over dirt mounds seemingly on their own while the kids watch in wonderment, there are actually hands in the background pushing them along. CES can be smoke and mirrors at times, that’s all part of a good toy story.

ActiveVideo’s going to have a presence at CES this year and there’s no smoke, no mirrors, but there is a cloud. The Internet cloud through which a connected CE device can bring new wonders to the delighted eyes of its users is on tap when ActiveVideo is embedded into a CE device.

The silver lining in the Web cloud is there for the taking, without embedding expensive and cumbersome software into the end device. A consumer electronics device — that’s CE, if you’ve been wondering — can be ActiveVideo-enabled and the enabling code would reach out to the cloud and make it rain down applications, content and other goodies for the end user.

It could be exclusive content for that particular CE manufacturer. And since ActiveVideo can work on virtually any Web-connected CE device, it doesn’t add to bill-of-materials costs, or take away from the CE industry’s already-thin margins.

Since CES is often a fantasy world, I don’t think it’s outrageous to use my own imagined scenario to describe what cloud connectivity can mean to a CE manufacturer. Suppose — and remember this is a fantasy — that the NFL, instead of granting its viewing rights to DirecTV, had the same for Sony, allowing specially equipped Sony televisions to receive what no one else could.

Remember, it’s a fantasy. But for our purposes, imagine what the impact would have been on Sony TV sales.

There’s a toy story worth pursuing, don’t you think?