• by Mark Lieberman , Op-Ed Contributor, January 10, 2011

Last week I had the good fortune to travel to Las Vegas and CES, where the energy was sky-high, as expected, and television -- smart, connected, 3-D, on tablets, and more -- was at the center of the high-tech conversation yet again.

From Steve Ballmer (and his red sweater) at MediaLink's kickoff at House of Blues, to Paul Allen, mesmerized in the Intel booth even before the doors opened, everyone was swept up in the moment.

But it was TV that was on the tip of everyone's tongue -- at least everyone I spoke to. 

You couldn't walk two feet without seeing some new iteration of hardware or software that promised to revolutionize the way consumers interact with their televisions.

Here are my top TV takeaways from the show: 

* 3-D TV: Glasses are everywhere, but since TV is communal, the current offering will be DOA. (Of course, glasses for PC-based 3D are different and could be compelling, since the PC is a personal experience.) But the most exciting long-term opportunities are clearly in the glassless big-screen TV solutions from Toshiba, Sony, and others. 

* Tablets: While Apple may still have the advantage simply because consumers will be frozen like deer in headlights by the explosion of alternative offerings, the standouts are the combination tablet-notebooks with flip keyboards and Windows 7 from Samsung and Dell. 

* Smart TV: Over in the Intel booth, a "Visibly Smart" interactive zone seemed to validate the point of my post from last week -- that smart TVs, embedded with Intel's Atom chip, will make the TV box manufacturers relevant again and provide consumers with a path to the future for new applications without having to purchase new hardware.

* TV Apps: A couple of recent arrivals got the heart racing. Yahoo TV is a widget on steroids, but the game-changer is the XFINITY from Comcast, which turns your iPad into another screen in your home for linear programming and VOD -- but home is now anywhere you are. Is this the beginning of an unwired cable company?

* Trojan Horse: Hands down, the biggest game-changer of the 2011 show was, in my opinion, gesture recognition from platforms such as Kinect. If you've somehow avoided it so far, all you need to know is that Kinect is the biggest idea in video games to come along in years - and for a first-generation effort, it's remarkably fun and well-executed

Talk about lean forward. Before we know, it remote controls and keyboards will be as obsolete as Atari joysticks (not to mention Wii nunchuks).

And once Microsoft integrates its in-game ad network, Massive (acquired back in 2006), it will be sitting on a seriously powerful platform for targeted advertising based on Kinect's ability to recognize who's watching.

But even more exciting were some early gesture-recognition software-only solutions bundled into smart TVs. In other words, imagine the same app without being tethered to the Xbox.

At the end of the day, when all the gadget-driven techno-euphoria dies down, television requires content, and someone needs to pay for that content. If it's going to be advertisers -- which I think it will -- they'll need to know where they're going to find ROI. It's going to take technology, innovation, and, most of all, reliable data to show them.

Welcome to the future of television.