MediaTalk | Season 4 | Ep. 2 - The New AI, Robots, TVs and Regulation Changing Consumer Tech

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Mike Reynolds: Hi, I'm Mike Reynolds, a senior reporter covering the media industry with the S&P Global Market Intelligence tech, media, and telecom news team. Welcome to "MediaTalk," a podcast hosted by S&P Global Market Intelligence, where the news and research staff explore issues in the ever-evolving media landscape. Today, MediaTalk is lucky to have a couple of regular guests in its virtual house. S&P Global Market Intelligence Kagan analyst Neil Barbour, who is part of the consumer technology team with an eye toward video games, connected devices, and streaming operating systems. My TMT colleague, Stefan Modrich, our Washington, DC-based technology policy reporter, is also back with us. As was the case just about this time last year, Neil and Stefan have returned from Las Vegas and the Consumer Electronics Show. We're going to get a field report of sorts from some of the things and people that they saw and what left lasting impressions. To that end, we're also going to talk to them and ask them to weigh in on a few things they'll be keeping close tabs on in their respective watches. As MediaTalk continues its 2026 Kagan preview coverage. Enough of me. How is it going, Neil? I think this is your sixth trip to CES. Last year, you reported good fortune during the last couple of hours in the city at the dice tables. I hope that was a repeat this year.

Neil Barbour: Mike, it wouldn't be any fun to win if you didn't lose every once in a while too. Let's put it that way.

Reynolds: Fair enough. Stefan, I think this is your second trip to CES. No sports betting for you, but I think you put the over and under at the attendance at the conference at about 150,000. Is that right?

Stefan Modrich: It was definitely another strong showing. And I did also manage to take in a Golden Knights game at the end of my trip. Good time.

Reynolds: Very nice. Alright, Neil, so as you headed out to Vegas, what were you looking for? What was your game plan as you hit your sixth CES?

Barbour: So I was really interested to see if there were going to be any practical micro RGB TVs this year. So this is going to get wonky, so bear with me for a minute, okay? Right now, the way a TV gets really bright is that it has a normal LCD display that's backlit by white LED lights, sometimes blue. When something needs to be really bright, those lights turn on to pop the image. The problem is that it washes the picture out. So if you really want vivid colors, you kind of have to buy an OLED TV. But OLED TVs can't get as bright as traditional LCD/LED TVs. So this is the solution that micro RGB is trying to account for. Instead of using the white backlights, it uses backlights in red, green, and blue, which are primary colors to make up all the other colors. So it reinforces the color on the display instead of just trying to highlight it. And actually, this opens up the display to displaying more of the perceptible color gamut, which makes the image look more vivid and realistic to the consumer or to the viewer. And sometimes it's hard to tell on the show floor, but these sets really pop. They look really cool. They were there last year in really big sort of aspirational sets, concept designs. And they were back this year in really big aspirational concept designs. So the problem is it's really expensive to put these TVs together right now. Maybe that's just because they haven't spun up the pipeline or something. Samsung had one that was 130 inches, and it was the price of a midsize sedan.

Reynolds: Okay. Garage viewing only, I take it.

Barbour: Or build a second house to put this thing in.

Reynolds: Okay. Alright.

Barbour: Hisense and TCL have smaller options at around the $10,000 level. And word on the street is that these still don't reach the deepest blacks that an OLED panel does. So some of your hardcore home theater enthusiasts might still not want this thing, but it's a really solid midrange option if they can get some more efficiency in the supply chain pipeline.

Reynolds: Okay. Anything else that you wanted to see and met or didn't meet expectations?

Barbour: Yeah, so I wanted to see this newish underdog video game console called the Next. They managed to grab some shelf space at Walmart and Target in time for the holiday shopping season last year, and in doing so, actually outsold the Xbox.

Reynolds: Really?

Barbour: Okay. At retail in the US, yeah. So the hook is that it's an evolution of the Wii or Wii Sports. You're expected to get up and move around, right? You get off the couch and pretend you're doing the thing. At the show, I played a virtual home run derby by holding a real wiffle bat and taking swings. It has a front-facing camera, so it can see when you swing, and it gives you tips on your grip and your form. There's also a bunch of mini-games for kids where you jump around. I think this device, in practice, where I finally got some hands-on with it, really scratches an accessibility itch that a lot of the established platformers have neglected. And I think that's why they've been doing so well at retail so far. And I would tag on here as well that I got to finally put on the Meta Ray-Ban displays, I think we talked briefly about in a previous episode. Yeah, they put on a pretty good show. A lot of companies have been doing monochrome text-rich displays in smart glasses, but this is the first time I think I've seen something as polished as an Android or an Apple UI in smart glasses. Think of what something on your smartwatch is doing, but in just your vision's periphery when you need it.

Reynolds: Okay. Before we jump over to Stefan, Neil, were you tani up there?

Barbour: We have a video up on the site right now. You can decide for yourself.

Reynolds: Alright. Stefan, how about you? As you headed out to Vegas, what was your itinerary like and what did you see?

Modrich: Sure. I had a slightly different lens through which I was taking in the show this year. And the backdrop from a policy standpoint of this whole kind of physical AI conversation is both at the federal and state level. There's a pretty strong emphasis on, if you're a governor, for example, wanting to bring jobs to your state. There's a panel with the governor of Nevada, Joe Lombardo, and Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy. Both of them were touting their state's ability to produce the energy that was required to power these massive data centers. I know this is a topic that we've covered before and have a ton of great data on. And then the sort of deregulatory agenda of the Trump administration was in the spotlight again. The subject of the AI executive order and the federal preemption of state laws was brought up. And that sort of a debate over whether a patchwork of laws versus the right of states to regulate their own AI agendas was brought to the forefront. And then Nvidia's Jensen Huang weighed in on that conversation as well. And didn't say anything that was unfamiliar to people who have been following the space closely. Our listeners and readers would likely know that he's come out in favor of that framework from the Trump administration. A lot of things that have been in the mainstream for the policy-savvy were brought into a new light for a wider audience here in Vegas.

Reynolds: Stefan, you mentioned AI. Did you guys, both of you, was there a lot of cool stuff on display, or is it 2025 was the year of AI, there's more to come? Is it becoming old hat or is there something cool and new that we should know about?

Modrich: Yeah, I can say that before this week's show, I had never been served coffee or ice cream from a robot. So that was an interesting experience. I did take a video of this company called XX Bot, which had produced these sort of virtual barista and ice cream machines. I believe that the ice cream machine, the figure that was reported was about $10,000 a pop there.

Reynolds: Okay.

Modrich: Yeah, not gonna slide in nice and neatly next to your fridge, but definitely an interesting experience to see that and definitely a lot of exposure to robots from my standpoint.

Reynolds: Alright, Neil, so what about you? Stefan's maybe Rosie from the Jetsons. Elon Musk is talking about, we're gonna have surgery from robots. I don't know if any of that was on display, but your takes on robotics from this year's CES.

Barbour: Yeah, robots were a huge takeaway from the show. A ton of cool little demos like Stefan was saying, where they could serve you various food items. There were also some doing laundry or playing ping pong. One took a Polaroid snapshot of me. It's interesting because this is really the first year where we saw the same predictive model approach that powers something like ChatGPT being pulled across to these dynamic robotics. There was a very convincing sense that these robots were assessing the world around them in real time and making informed decisions about which action to take next, whereas in years past, it seemed like it was more like canned animations. So, in terms of trying to peel the layer back and look into the future a few years, the pitch is that these robots would slot into your daily life. LG, in particular, opened the show with another robot that was roaming around the kitchen, getting dinner started for you, stuff like that. But they're a little too expensive, as Stefan noted, and frankly a little impractical. They're slow, they're clunky, they're prone to error. If you're familiar with the level system of autonomous vehicles, where Level 1 is lane assist and Level 5 is maybe full self-driving, we're at Level 4 for cars now, which is the Waymo model. You sit in the back, they can drive in specified areas without any help. But for the robots, I think we're more at Level 3. They can do what they need to do, but they end up needing a little nudge in the right direction every once in a while. So I think in the near term, you might see these robots slotting into warehouses and factories and displacing some blue-collar labor jobs. I don't think we're gonna have them doing chores in the household.

Reynolds: So not in our homes and apartments at this juncture?

Barbour: I'm not seeing it.

Reynolds: Okay. Neil, as you come away from Vegas as an analyst, what's 2026 look like? What are some of the key stories that you're gonna be following this year?

Barbour: Yeah. At the risk of yapping about TVs a little more, I would bring up that this is one of those years that has both the World Cup and the Olympics in it. Which is a huge opportunity to sell TVs, among other things, as you're sure, we're advertising and so forth. And when you sell a TV these days, you're also selling an advertising platform via the streaming operating system that could drive revenue for the life of the TV, say five to ten years. So the stakes are really high because this market is quickly maturing and this may be one of the last opportunities to really move the needle. That's why we're seeing Walmart leverage its Vizio acquisition with the On TV line running SmartCast. Amazon is trying to slim down the cost of its Fire TV solution to get into more sets. Roku is firming up its first-party operations. So that's gonna be a big battlefield. The second thing I might point to is that computing and gaming hardware is getting really expensive because of RAM shortages related to the demands of data centers that are running all these large language models and other cloud compute. So I think in practice that just means that a lot of people are gonna hold onto their older hardware longer than they might have anticipated, which will hurt shipments but maybe not the installed base or the user base so much. However, I would say this could be a catalyst that turns people onto cloud gaming and other cloud services, remote rendering, which doesn't require those upfront hardware purchases.

Reynolds: Stefan, what about you, Washington? What are you looking at? I think we've referenced Nvidia back just now, and in our December installment, everybody has their eyes on that company. What are you thinking these days?

Modrich: Sure. I'll start with the policy outlook. They're definitely playing the greatest hits of the Trump administration when it comes to the language of that leading in that AI space. So definitely framing the vision of the AI executive order exporting American AI and even a member of the State Department, Jacob Helberg, the undersecretary, was mentioning the Pax Silica initiative, which is a multi-nation coalition that will soon add India to the likes of the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, and South Korea, to name a few. And basically, that's just a fancy way of affirming the need for supply chains like the semiconductor industry to remain secure and efficient. And naturally, where does Nvidia fit into all that? Of course, we've talked a lot about the export control licenses of the H200 chips to China. And Neil and I both attended the Nvidia press conference for media and analysts at CES, and Jensen Huang told us there that he was still awaiting licensing approvals from the Commerce Department, and he did not expect to receive any notification from them about that. So that's where things are at the moment. And of course, we need to see where China will fit into that picture as well. Because again, that conditional approval is required on their end.

Reynolds: So Neil, what are you thinking about Nvidia?

Barbour: Yeah, it was interesting that Jensen also talked about, they introduced their, I believe it's called Vera Rubin Chipset, which is the successor to Blackwell. And he mentioned that once these H200 sort of sell through, then maybe there will be a regulatory lane where the Blackwell chips can then float over to places like China. And he was, generally speaking, the broader point was that we called it quote-unquote "Moore's Law on steroids," is that these AI supercomputers would get so much faster at such a quick rate that they're going to be turning in new chipsets every year. And the way that they used to turn in new graphics card chipsets every year.

Reynolds: Wow, okay. Yeah. Is there, as you guys look at this again, it's a chips world. Stefan, what else on the Washington wrap is gonna be keeping you busy in the months ahead here?

Modrich: Sure. So I think, as businesses are grappling with the landscape of what a federal preemption looks like for those state and local AI laws. Could we see Supreme Court challenges? I believe as we are speaking that we will eventually learn more about the Supreme Court's stance on the tariff decision that has been on the minds of a lot of various tech suppliers. Those things will continue to impact the way that the tech industry positions itself around whatever geopolitical constraints or dynamics are imposed on them. And then what direction the privacy laws will go is another open question about FCC chair Brendan Carr mentioned that he is empowered under the AI executive order to initiate a review for broadband deployments of the state AI laws that may be in conflict with the new federal law. Those are things to keep an eye on for those in kind of the emerging satellite internet provider fields with all that's happening there.

Reynolds: Right? I'm getting nudged in the sense that I haven't mentioned AI enough. Neil, what's the AI look in the gaming and all the various disciplines? You cover much more this year.

Barbour: I think you're gonna see a big emphasis on pushing forward digital assistants that are already embedded into your existing device. I think this week we saw Apple partner with Google to link Gemini up with Siri. They're hoping that unlocks the use cases and general usability that they've already advertised on. And although some Android users probably already have access to Gemini, Apple commands something like half the market in that range, we're going to learn a lot more about what people actually want to do with AI on their phones and smartwatches and laptops over the next year. I would also keep an eye on what agentic AI means for consumers. There was a lot of talk at CES about being able to say, I want to buy this or that directly into a prompt or a device. Having those purchases execute in a low-friction environment, that's the dream of retailers. Anyway, let's see if they can make it happen this year.

Reynolds: Okay. Fellas, we're at the end here. You know my catchall, we've jumped around a lot. What did I jump over? Is there something we haven't touched at all on that really bears your and our attention in 2026? You first, Stefan.

Modrich: Sure. So I thought it would be fun to make a callback to the show we did around this time last year. And I know that one of the areas of focus was on health tech, and I think anecdotally at least that seemed to be the case again this year. Like companies like Abbott Labs and then a handful of other startups talked to an entrepreneur who was showcasing a hydration wearable device. And so that made me think of last year when I demoed the intake breathing nasal dilator device. And that was a major unknown at the time. And surely it may still be for a lot of people. And so I thought it was interesting to follow that company over the past year, seeing them get endorsements from athletes like Carlos Correa and Logan Paul. And seeing them grow to the extent that they had seen a fourfold growth in their subscriber base, still they're still even at a pre-seed or revenue-generating stage. So hard to get visibility into exactly how they're doing financially there. But at least from an exposure standpoint, definitely have more of a profile than they did. So I guess all that is to say it's interesting to see how companies actually perform out of their appearance at a show like CES and what sort of boost or exposure that gives them. The story is not always necessarily told during that week. It's something that's gonna take time to track and follow. And so I think that's worth bearing in mind for some of the things we've talked about today.

Reynolds: Yeah. I guess in general, things just don't happen overnight. It takes a while to gestate and then hopefully it hits. Anyway. Neil, last word to you. What haven't you talked about that you're gonna be thinking about in the months ahead here?

Barbour: Yeah, I'll also swing back to CES real quick here to underline a couple of upstart chip companies. I met with the first is xMEMS, which is building a very tiny chip that is capable of pushing a ton of air around really quickly. So the upshot there is it could be packaged directly into consumer devices that have a hard time dissipating heat. Think of your phone when you bring out like a big-time video game, or you're doing a lot of video processing or something along those lines and your phone suddenly heats up. This thing could switch on and push that heat out, increase the efficiency, and perhaps the lifetime on the phone or maybe put directly into the CPU in your laptop. I know that some of the gear that we have on site here can heat up pretty quickly. Imagine that having a better time anticipating that heat. Another one is in Aero, which is developing an efficient sensor microcontroller with quote-unquote neuromorphic designs that can improve the battery life of wearables, remote smart home equipment, and speakers. So these are the little tweaks that go unnoticed by the end user that really drive the industry and unlock the functionality and use case gains that we tend to take for granted. And those guys are nested in the show and it's always fun to take their temperature.

Reynolds: Cool. There you have it. Audio dispatches from Vegas, appreciate you being with us today, Stefan.

Modrich: Thank you, Mike.

Reynolds: And thanks to Kagan's Neil Barbour, who was doing some podcasting on his own. Neil, tell us about your installment.

Barbour: Yeah, sure. Data and Dimensions, Episode One is now live. We're exploring the way that the internet is pushing into 3D virtual spaces, along with AI, along with robotics, along with XRVR hardware. So a lot of interesting new emerging tech threads to pull out that we'll be doing biweekly over the year. And perhaps beyond.

Reynolds: Okay. Appreciate you being here as always. This is Mike Reynolds. Thanks to all of you for listening. We'll catch up soon in the next episode of MediaTalk.