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Increasingly CES isn’t just a place for technology companies to exhibit their wares — media outlets are getting in on the act to show off their content and explain to consumers how they can use modern tech to access TV shows or other media. We took a trip to the NBC stand to berate them for cancelling Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, but they pretty much refused to renew the show, despite our tears.
They did have some cool things on display, however. Firstly there were computers demonstrating Hulu, the NBC and Fox joint venture to distribute clips and whole TV programmes online.
NBC was also broadcasting one of its shows from the CNBC network from the stand. If you were there at the right time you got to see them making a programme, and you could press your face up against some glass in the vain hope of being on TV. We took our ‘Hello Mum!!1!’ sign, but no joy was had with our relentless (and frankly pathetic) quest for fame.
One of the things we liked was that NBC was giving away 2GB SanDisk memory cards (pictured above). This seemed generous in itself, but the nice lady at the booth explained that if we put our memory card in one of the pedestal things we could download some TV shows.
This, of course, brought out our inner child and we couldn’t wait to start playing around. Although there aren’t really that many commercial applications for this tech, we thought it was funky. And it seemed to work pretty well, although DRM was involved. Click through to see how it worked. -Ian Morris
In order to download the content to the memory stick, all you had to do was select the programme you wanted, touch the screen, and it downloaded. Nice. We picked an episode of Eureka and the Sheinhardt Wig Corporation’s 30 Rock — you’ll need to watch 30 Rock to get that reference.
Once you select the programme you want to download, it was sent to the memory card. This didn’t take very long, but while the file was being copied we were warned we’d need to connect to the Internet the first time we played it, to authorise the DRM. Euuugh.
With all that taken care of we now had a memory stick with an episode of 30 Rock and Eureka to watch on the flight home from Vegas. Awesome.
