Moonves Over Las Vegas
Gadget lovers are giving themselves hourly sponge-baths today, as the keynote addresses of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and MacWorld in San Francisco pump out a flood of product announcements. Steve Jobs has already finished (and he’s exhausted!) but Les Moonves of CBS is still slated for a few hours from now.
Jobs announced the iPhone (anyone surprised? Hands?) and said they’re now taking orders for AppleTV, an entertainment center device which will stream video from your iTunes computer upstairs. It looks like a sliced-down Mac Mini. Incidentally, he introduced the iPhone by playing LOVELY RITA from the SGT. PEPPER album.
OMFG! Perhaps that deal with Apple records is closer than we thought! But not close enough to announce.
Moonves is expected to bring a few people with him to the podium. Chad Hurley of YouTube is one of them - interesting. Blake Krikorian, head honcho of the company that makes Slingbox (see above about the home entertainment device, only not resesembling a Mac Mini) is another. And look, there’s Philip Rosendale, the guy behind SECOND LIFE!
Oh, and he’s bringing some TV people with him.
Other guests expected to appear with Moonves are “CSI” creator Anthony Zuiker; Brian Bedol, CEO of college sports network CSTV; radio personalities Opie And Anthony; “The L Word” creator Ilene Chaikin and that show’s star, Jennifer Beals.
But that’s not the interesting part. Actually there are two interesting parts, both fish-out-of-water stories: Moonves at a technology show (CBS doesn’t make hardware! But you need hardware to watch CBS, dontcha?) and those computer guys with Moonves. They are said to be there to demonstrate that CBS isn’t going down with the Titanic of Old Network television - those three companies are the floatation devices that CBS will grab at as it is pulled beneath the surface of the icy new media waters. In any event, it will prove to Moonves’ trigger-happy boss Sumner Redstone that Moonves has a strategy.