CNET was ready to give the Hopper with Sling DVR, a set-top box from Dish Network, a spot in the finals of its “Best in CES” awards at the Consumer Electronics Show — until a directive came through from the site’s corporate parent CBS that the Hopper couldn’t win the award, because CBS is suing the company over its AutoHop commercial-skipping feature.

Not only was the Hopper disqualified from the award, but CNET added an editor’s note to its review of the device saying it would no longer be reviewing any products that were the subject of litigation with its parent company — a list that would include both the Hopper and Aereo, the over-the-net video broadcasting startup backed by Barry Diller, which CBS is also suing.

As John Hermann of BuzzFeed noted, this is probably every tech journalist’s nightmare: being told by a corporate parent that they can’t do their jobs because the parent co. is involved in a a lawsuit. But it’s more than just a journalist’s nightmare — it could be a serious problem for CNET when it comes to maintaining the trust of their readers. The site noted that the restrictions only affects its reviews and not its news reporting, but will readers make that distinction?

Presumably, when someone goes to the CNET site looking for information about set-top boxes or video-streaming hardware, they want the most complete information they can find. If they know that certain products aren’t going to be reviewed because CBS doesn’t like them for some reason, that’s going to color their impressions of the site’s thoroughness in doing its reviews — and it might also make them wonder about what else is being left out.

The more cynical might wonder whether anyone will even notice once the CES decision blows over, but for media entities — even large ones — in times like these, the trust of their readers is more valuable than ever, and it should probably not be squandered lightly.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Hans Gerwitz

By broadcast, McAdam was referring to LTE-broadcast, one of the many multicast technologies that’s been kicking around the wireless industry for years. LTE-broadcast would turn cell towers into the equivalent of mini-digital TV towers that could multicast video, audio and even data to multiple users simultaneously.

Right now mobile multimedia works through an on-demand unicast model. Every time you stream a video or a song to your smartphone, you get your own dedicated portion of the cell’s capacity to deliver your content, even if the guy right next to you is watching the same program. That unicast model and video’s intensive bandwidth demands explain why mobile video is such a network hog.

LTE-broadcast, however, would turn a portion of a network’s bandwidth into a multicast network, sending a single video or audio stream to multiple devices similar to the way TV and radio towers broadcast their programming.

If this all sounds familiar, you’re probably recalling Qualcomm’s FLO TV service of the last decade, which shut down in 2010 for lack of subscribers, devices and compelling content. Or perhaps the TV broadcasters’ own Dyle mobile digital TV initiative, which appears to be going nowhere very slowly. But there are some pretty key differences between those efforts and the LTE-broadcast technology that McAdam is talking about.

Qualcomm’s FLO technology required (and Dyle requires) a special receiver and therefore a dedicated TV handset to receive their respective transmissions. That pretty much doomed them from the beginning. But LTE-broadcast is based on the evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS) technology being standardized for LTE. Chipmakers like Qualcomm have already committed to supporting eMBMS in their future radio silicon. That means future handsets will be pretty much eMBMS-ready whether carriers chose to use the technology or not.

eMBMS also uses the same LTE radio infrastructure, requiring only upgrades to the network core. So if a carrier decides to get into the broadcast business, the equipment is largely in place. The barriers to entry are much lower for LTE-broadcast, but there’s still one big question: will consumers actually use it?

The age of personalized multimedia

The problem is that an increasingly technically savvy public is moving away from broadcast models completely when it comes to digital content. Consumers are personalizing their radios with Pandora and Spotify. The reason HBO Go rocks is we don’t have to be at home a pre-determined hour –- or set our DVRs –- to watch the next episode of Game of Thrones. We just pull content out of the air whenever we please.

There are still plenty of people consuming broadcast video and audio on their TVs and car stereos, but on smartphones and tablets streaming is king. By imposing a broadcast model, carriers would be going against mobile data trends.

That’s why McAdam highlighted the Super Bowl as the ideal use case for LTE-broadcast. Blockbuster live events would attract hundreds of thousands of simultaneous viewers that would best make use of the technology. Verizon already streams entire NFL games through its NFL Mobile app, so being able to multicast those games would save it enormous amounts of network capacity — or so you might think.

There are a lot of cells out there

The thing about mobile networks is that they’re much denser than TV broadcast networks. Instead of using a single tower to cover a whole city, hundreds if not thousands of towers — each sporting multiple sectors — blanket any given metropolis with mobile broadband. Even if thousands of people in the same city are watching the same game on their phones, chances are few of them are going to be in the same cells at the same time. Multicasting effectively becomes unicasting if there is only one person receiving the transmission.

Nokia Siemens Networks’ conception of a heterogeneous network

What’s more, cells will start shrinking and multiplying as carriers begin deploying small cells and heterogeneous network (HetNet) architectures. The more cells in the networks, the less chance you’ll have users simultaneously streaming the same content in any given cell, unless you’re talking about big events. But playoff games and the State of the Union Addresses don’t occur everyday.

According to a new research report from iGR, carriers are weighing those factors, and some of them are leaning towards deploying LTE-broadcast selectively, targeting venues where people are most likely to stream the same content. Airports would be a good example, but so would a sports arena. Ticketholders might be watching the same games live, but they could all view the same replay videos simultaneously.

The iGR report also proposes that LTE-broadcast could turn our phones and tablets into mobile DVRs. We could subscribe to particular TV programs on apps like HBO Go. At set times, the LTE-broadcast network would schedule the download of various shows, beaming them down to thousands if not millions of devices simultaneously and caching them for later consumption. There’s nothing to prevent LTE-broadcast from being used for other types of media or data like digital magazines or device OS updates.

iGR projects that mobile video will account for 71 percent of mobile network data traffic in 2016. By utilizing LTE-broadcast, the study concludes, carriers could reduce capacity demand on their networks by 12.5 percent overall and by 15 percent at peak hours, the study found. The bottom line is unicast on-demand video will remain supreme, but a 15 percent capacity savings when the network needs it most is certainly nothing to scoff at.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Peter Sobolev

The project is called Avicii x You, and on its website, you can listen to and download the basic chord progression for the song’s planned melody. Starting on Wednesday, the site will begin accepting submissions (the process is still a bit vague) for audio samples of a fully developed melody using the chord layout, pitch and key Avicii has indicated. Over the next two months, the site will begin accepting submissions for the song’s bassline, effects, rhythms and vocals. The finished single will be released as a single on Feb. 26, coinciding with the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

It’s not clear whether participants will have any say in the samples used for the various tracks or any other input on composition beyond their initial submissions. But it looks like Avicii will have the final say on the finished single. In that sense, the crowd isn’t so much composing the song as providing a huge repository of raw audio materials.

Ericsson is spearheading the project with the help of Avicii’s label Universal Music Sweden as part of its Networked Society initiative, which aims to discover new means for industries, institutions and people to interact through real-time broadband communications. According to Ericsson, the music industry has already embraced the digital network as a means of distributing music and connecting to fans. The project will explore whether the network can be used as means of producing music as well.

But is Hollywood’s new movie cloud really ready for prime time? Can any initiative like this thrive without Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and Disney? (NYSE: DIS) And even more important, what happens if they don’t get it right?

At CES, UltraViolet’s backers – which include Warner Bros. (NYSE: TWX), Sony (NYSE: SNE), Universal and Paramount (NYSE: VIA), as well as major consumer electronics and retail brands – pushed aside complaints by early adopters that the system’s authentication process is too cumbersome.

The new format’s backers said that since new Blu-ray releases supporting UltraViolet began to roll off replication lines late last year, roughly 750,000 consumers have signed up for the program, which puts a DRM-steeped digital version of the movie they just bought on physical disc in the cloud and available for viewing on other devices.

For studios like Sony, which five years ago helped spearhead the formation of the 70-plus member group that created UltraViolet, the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), the initiative is crucial.

“We are talking about true DRM interoperability for the first time,” said Mitch Singer, chief technology officer for DECE member studio Sony, speaking at the alliance’s CES press event. “Consumers don’t have to worry about or make technology decisions before buying content. You’ll buy a device, you’ll download an app, it’ll be associated and branded UltraViolet, and you know your content will play.

Driven by consumers’ cooling DVD purchasing habits, the home entertainment sector has declined for the last seven years, dropping 2 percent in 2011, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, a single-digit benchmark that was actually considered strong relative to recent yearly craterings.

Theatrical distribution — the other big-ticket studio revenue stream — has also seen better days, declining for the second straight year, with the domestic box office finishing 2011 with about $10.17 billion — off from $10.56 billion in 2010. Perhaps worse, movie attendance was the lowest it’s been since 1992. (Although, the lower-margin foreign exhibition market remains quite strong.)

The studios believe UltraViolet will help re-establish a higher margin urge to purchase movies on behalf of consumers, who have been more apt recently to engage in lower-margin activities, like stream films and TV shows on Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) or rent DVDs for a $1.20 a night from a Redbox kiosk.

Coupled with restraints on rental outlets — like Warner’s 56-day delay on providing new titles to Netflix — the studios believe UltraViolet won’t just kick-start the nascent business of electronic sell-through, but good old-fashioned disc-buying, too.

In a nutshell, UltraViolet works like this: Buy an Ultraviolet-signatory DVD, Blu-ray or EST title, and a digital version of the film lives in the cloud ready for you to access and play on up to 12 different devices. The system is designed with families in mind — up to six members of a clan can access an UltraViolet account, even if they don’t live in the primary domicile.

There are plenty of perks planned. At CES, for example, Samsung introduced a new Blu-ray player capable of uploading the user’s entire existing disc collection to the cloud for a nominal fee. Further, take the family to a hotel outfitted by DECE member LodgeNet, a provider of media and connectivity solutions to the hospitality industry, and you can access your movie collection from your room.

There are big benefits for the studios, too. They believe this buy-once, play-anywhere scheme will free consumers to once again build movie libraries, since they will now have more options in an electronics universe increasingly devoid of optical drives.

And Hollywood is anxious to get started — about 19 UltraViolet titles have been released since the fourth quarter, including Warner’s Green Lantern and Horrible Bosses, Sony’s The Smurfs and Universal’s Cowboys and Aliens.

Perhaps most notably, the UltraViolet label has appeared on the disc jackets of Warner’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2, which was the most popular film of 2011, grossing well over $1 billion worldwide.

And a promotional blitz is set to begin in the coming months, with DECE also announcing at CES a promotional partnership with another studio-backed consortium, the Digital Entertainment Group (DEG), the organization that helped get Blu-ray off the ground — albeit, quite slowly — six years ago.

“We’ll start having marketing messages — you’ll start seeing TV spots,” Singer said. “The [UltraViolet label] will be on every single disc.”

That speed to get into the market was second-guessed at CES this week, with accounts of early adopters frustrated by UlraViolet’s extensive digital rights management, which requires users to register at two different websites.

Singer boiled down these troubles as “unfinished carpentry” on a “great house,” but others were vexed by their inability to get their UltraViolet movies to play on mobile devices made by Apple, which notably hasn’t yet signed on to DECE.

The failure so far to gain a foothold into Apple’s closed technology universe has been a major detraction from UltraViolet, as has the non-participation of Disney, which has its own DRM locker project in the works, Keychest. DECE continues to talk to both parties about joining its coalition.

But at CES, it became apparent that even some of the studios that are on board with DECE aren’t necessarily all in yet, with Fox (NSDQ: NWS) revealing its decision to hold off on releasing UltraViolet movies until there are more retail outlets to sell them and more devices that play them.

In terms of the former, the announcement last week by Amazon that it will begin selling Warner’s UltraViolet offerings was a key step for an initiative that needed more retail backing.

Concurrently, however, DECE revealed that Netflix had quietly let its DECE membership lapse. It wasn’t a surprise to many to see Netflix pull out of UltraViolet, given Netflix CEO’s Reed Hastings’ historical reluctance to get into the movie-selling business. At one point, Netflix’s player app was seen as a nice work-around for playing UltraViolet movies on the iPad and iPhone. Movie social network site Flixster, which was acquired by Warner last year, now has the only app for playing UltraViolet movies on both PC and Apple platforms.

For his part, Singer downplayed all of these concerns, noting that UltraViolet is still in its “very, very early” stages of development. “You could almost consider this a beta launch,” he added.

Some numbers out from eMarketer (via Memeburn) seem to imply that up to now, advertisers have not ignored connected TV. But nor has interest in it grown:

Looking just at investment in just in digital video advertising (itself only a part of overall spend in digital ads), only eight percent of advertisers said they invested in connected TV video ads in 2011. That’s a modest number, and smaller than other mediums like mobile, where respectively 42 and 41 percent of advertisers said they would spend on iPhone and iPad platforms, and 31 percent said they would invest in ads for Android devices.

Perhaps more tellingly, that eight percent was flat on the year before — that implies that interest in the medium of connected TV seems to have stalled.

Publishers, meanwhile, seem to also be trying to play catch-up in this area: in 2011, 17 percent said they supported video advertising for connected TVs, while only 11 percent supported it in 2010. According to eMarketer’s numbers that puts connected TV video ads on par with video advertising support for non-Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) tablets, but still a ways behind iPhone and iPad (both 35 percent) and Android smartphones (28 percent).

Judging by announcements last week during CES, consumer electronics companies still laying the groundwork for how advertising on connected TV platforms might work in the years ahead:

– Samsung is forging its Smart TV strategy on its own, proprietary platform (complete with Kinect-like gesture recognition and lots of content options). And last week it also launched its own AdHub connected TV advertising services. Premium Interactive Advertising (PIA) is Samsung’s very first ad initiative for its Smart TV platform, and offers advertisers banner advertising on its home screen with functions like click to microsite (interactive multi pages), click to video, and click to application.

– And while Google (NSDQ: GOOG) had a mixed showing for its Google TV connected platform at CES, it continues to make headway into how it is helping more traditional broadcasters sell and manage their advertising inventory. (Their latest customer win: Cox Media.) As those broadcasters begin to consider how they offer advertising on connected TVs, I think it’s a safe bet to say that Google will step up to offer their services there, too.

– Sony’s music and media technology company Gracenote, meanwhile, launched an interesting-looking new service called Entourage, which uses “audio fingerprinting technology” to listen to short clips of content via a mobile device that can trigger the service to then look up content on a smart TV, be it a film to purchase or an advertisement. Gracenote, of course, will need buy-in from smart TV players to make this into an actual service; given that Gracenote is owned by Sony (NYSE: SNE), their might be the first TVs, mobiles and other products where you will see it work first.

– Meanwhile, Sony inked another interactive TV ad deal: Yahoo’s connected TV services, which serve content related to programs and advertisements on regular TV, will now be embedded in Sony Bravia sets. Like Gracenote, it offers an audio-based trigger to deliver advertising (its technology comes from its own subsidiary, IntoNow). Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) says its 180-odd connected TV apps already work on connected TV services from Samsung, VIZIO, Toshiba, Haier and HiSense. Yahoo is also starting to roll out new ad units around its these: it says that Toyota is the first company to use such a service, with display ads placed into Yahoo’s Fantasy Football TV app.

– Ooyala is another online video player that is linking up with a vendor, in this case Panasonic for its Viera line of connected TVs. Advertisers and content publishers now using its platform will now also be able to publish their content on Panasonic’s TVs as they are now able to do on mobile and Internet platforms. The Country Network will be the first broadcaster to use the service to offer selections of its content on-demand and live through Panasonic’s platform.

Considering this is CES we are talking about, it’s unsurprising to have a profusion of device- and platform-led announcements, although in the bigger scheme of things broadcasters will inevitably also be playing a role.

“I think traditional broadcasters want to be seen to be involved in new media today,” says Simon Murray, an analyst with Digital TV Research in the UK. “They were slow before and now want to be involved in new technologies and providing information and serving advertisers in different ways.” But he also notes that “Broadcasters have a bit of a dilemma. Obviously they want to diversify but they don’t want to alienate existing advertisers and traditional ways of advertising because it’s still their bread and butter. Puttng too many ads on to programs outside their traditional market might upset their ad base.”

But regardless of who controls the game, perhaps the biggest issue of all is that, unlike internet or even mobile penetration, we are still a long way from critical mass in connected TV services. Figures from Strategy Analytics estimate that by the end of 2011, there were only 12 million connected TV devices distributed globally by the end of 2011. The U.S. had a penetration of only eight percent while Europe’s connected TV device penetration was seven percent.

That, too, appears to be changing, though. Digital TV Research forecasts that it will take until 2016 for there to be a global penetration of 20 percent in connected TV services — that includes not just connected sets, but also other devices such as blu-ray players; games consoles; retail set-top boxes and pay-TV set-top boxes. Highly anticipated updates from the likes of Apple and its Apple TV could also advance the market.

While today games consoles are the most common way for making a TV internet-friendly, Murray says he thinks that connected TVs will overtake games consoles by the end of this year (2012) as the main route to accessing Internet services via televisions worldwide, driven by more widely-available

“The thing about advertisers is that they want traffic. Some will experiment earlier. It might appeal to advertisers selling highly priced items such as cars, where you might want to demonstrate features of, say, a new model of the BMW, but I don’t know how much P&G or Unilever would benefit TV interactive advertising today,” Murray told paidContent. “I think it will be a fairly minor and experimental feature for at least the next five years, until the market becomes more established.”

Much more in our CES archives.

A magazine-shaped promo piece stacked in the publication bins but with none of the publishers’ content inside. Instead, the company played up its tablet editions and their cross-device access by offering them all free of charge at CES for download to iPad, Kindle Fire, Nook Tablet/Nook Color and Android devices via NextIssue. (You can try it this weekend; the free trial ends Sunday night.)

A magazine-shaped promo piece stacked in the publication bins but with none of the publishers’ content inside. Instead, the company played up its tablet editions and their cross-device, all-in-one subscription access by offering them all free of charge at CES for download to iPad, Kindle Fire, Nook Tablet/Nook Color and Android devices via NextIssue. (You can try it this weekend; the free trial ends Sunday night.) The downloaded issues will be accessible on devices after the promo ends.

I wasn’t at CES but I heard about this when I was working on another story and it caught my attention. Instead of handling out cards for one free download or sticking with a single title or device, the company tried something that matches the best of its digital intentions: getting attention for its tablet strategy, while showing the device makers it can be a good partner and stressing an ecumenical approach at the same time.

A spokesperson says “thousands” of people have used the code but wouldn’t give it a range; the most popular title is the one that usually includes the most tech coverage, Time.

Time Inc. isn’t alone in trying to get this kind of attention for its mass of tablet mags. Conde Nast, for instance, has been highlighted on the Kindle Fire since launch with 90-day free trials of its titles in a promo play aimed at getting subscribers from new device owners. Time Inc. is also trying a more traditional promo play with a digital twist with its new Nook deal: subscribe to People on the Nook for a year at $9.99 a month and get a Nook Tablet free.

It’s not hard to understand why Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) decided to make CES 2012 its last, although it would have been nice if they’d at least made an effort to mark the occasion. The event is impressive, overwhelming, electric, and tiring with a 50 percent markup on coffee and five times as much cigarette smoke as the modern tech office worker encounters on a daily basis.

It’s the type of event that given its sheer size (over 150,000 people picked up a badge for CES, a new high) and emphasis on glitz that one expects to be memorable. There were a few things that the mobile world will remember about CES 2012: the determination shown by Nokia (NYSE: NOK) to get America right this time and the positive feedback they and Microsoft enjoyed; the blunt realization that Android is so ubiquitous that dozens of new phones were announced at the show with hardly anyone noticing; and the five-years-too-late introduction of a real smartphone powered by Intel.

But because of that size and its awkward timing just after the holiday season, CES requires that tech companies pretend to put on a show for attendees and that those in the media who depend on tech companies to do things they can talk about to pretend that it’s some sort of huge mind-blowing experience.

The biggest story in technology during CES week had nothing to do with any display of consumer electronics. Google’s decision to pollute its search results with a half-baked social graph of Google+ users was easily the most talked-about event in technology during the week. Nothing unveiled at CES came even close to generating that kind of reaction.

The energy required to attend CES coupled with the lack of anything that fired up the crowd caused predictable blowback from those who slog through the Las Vegas Convention Center, perhaps best shown in this existential lament from Gizmodo’s Mat Honan about the meaning of it all. In a way, it’s all Apple’s fault: everyone keeps expecting every “special” event like CES to produce something as explosive as the iPhone was in January 2007 (an event that far overshadowed the CES of that year) each and every time.

It just can’t happen. Products like that, and the resulting buzz that generates page views, only come along once in a rare while. And nowadays when companies think they have a product like that, they tend to introduce it on their terms to make sure they carry the hypershort media cycle, rather than sharing it with Justin Bieber or some crazy television that etches high-definition images into your brain.

But if you put aside the gadget obsession for a while, you can start to see how companies used this CES to set themselves up for the coming year.

The 2012 bronze medal in mobile is now Microsoft’s and Nokia’s to lose, spurring a wave of “Microsoft is back!” sentiment that paired nicely with a BusinessWeek interview designed as a Steve Ballmer image-rehabilitation project. However fortuitous the timing, it showed the fiery CEO has finally come to terms with the notion that he is an underdog in the most important personal computing market of the future.

Google let its partners introduce all those slightly different Android handsets early in the week before revealing on Thursday that it wants Android developers to focus on application consistency. That may cause a problem for those Android partners who insist they have to differentiate themselves despite fragmentation problems, especially considering that Google is now requiring they make the stock Google experience available to developers on their phones in order to carry a link to the Android Market.

Intel (NSDQ: INTC) has now linked itself with Motorola (NYSE: MMI) and Google, an interesting trio given Intel CEO Paul Otellini’s presence on Google’s board and Motorola’s pending purchase by Google (NSDQ: GOOG). If Google forgets that it promised to operate Motorola as a standalone company, some interesting products could emerge from that alliance.

Samsung continued to emerge as a new powerhouse, with one of the biggest presences at CES coupled with a much more practical presentation of itself to attendees: no wolf-costumed preteens were involved with Samsung’s promotional strategy at CES this year.

And Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) sent 250 people, including head of iOS marketing Greg Joswiak, to CES in order to scout competitors and take the pulse of the industry.

CES is still relevant and necessary because of the personal interactions that it forces among tech industry professionals, and it will keep that role in 2013 after Microsoft departs the show. But we have to stop thinking about it as an event that will produce a blockbuster, and be content with the opportunity to measure the pulse of an entire industry rather than succumb to the relentless churn of minor developments.

“Arm not only was the key technology behind the Newton, but it eventually became the key technology behind every mobile device in the world today including the iPhone and the iPad,” he said.

Sculley, at the show as an investor, talked with the BBC about the Newton, Steve Jobs and more. Some excerpts:

–

Newton was probably 15 years too early. I’m not a technologist. I didn’t have the experience to make that judgment but we were I think right on many of the concepts. The product clearly failed in terms of taking on such an ambitious goal. I think in hindsight there is a lot of good legacy there with the Newton. Even if the product itself never survived the technology did.

–

I think that Apple has revolutionised every other consumer industry, why not television? … The irony is that as the pictures get better and the choice of content gets broader, that the complexity of the experience of using the television gets more and more complicated. So it seems exactly the sort of problem that if anyone is going to change the experience of what the first principles are, it is going to be Apple.

–

The myth that I fired Steve wasn’t true and the myth that I destroyed Apple, that wasn’t true either. A lot of things happened after I left before Steve came back.