The entertainment community has kept tabs on CES for decades, monitoring the giant Las Vegas tech confab and fitting in semi-regular trips there.
The timing, though, coincides with a busy stretch spanning the Palm Springs and Sundance film festivals, the Golden Globes and the ramp-up of Oscar season.
This year, organizers at the Consumer Technology Association have upped the show’s entertainment factor. CES this year is inaugurating a partnership with the Cannes Marché du Film and will see an expanded presence for Netflix alongside recent regulars like Disney, Amazon and NBCUniversal.
A tumultuous 2025, which was punctuated by Netflix’s $82.7 billion proposal to acquire the studios-and-streaming division of Warner Bros. Discovery, the ultimate collision of tech and Hollywood, proved that being fluent in tech talk isn’t just a laudable goal. For those in traditional media roles, it could be a survival tactic. And survival is the word when we’re talking about a convention that last year hosted 142,465 attendees.
Paramount Skydance, which is pursuing its own hostile bid for WBD, is backed by Oracle, one of the main combatants in the global AI race. The latest AI wares will be exhibited in Las Vegas, as usual, but there could be a more tangible wow factor this year given that heavy spending by major companies is starting to reach fruition. Analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities expects tangible effects of companies’ massive investments in AI to be on vivid display.
“The vibe of CES this year is around new chip announcements, AI driven products on the consumer ecosystem, and in essence a new era opening up for companies around the world set to capitalize on $3 trillion to $4 trillion of AI Cap Ex hitting the market over the next 3 years,” Ives wrote in a recent note to clients. “We also expect a growing China tech presence at the show with robotics and smart vehicles (Xpeng-flying car, etc.) some key highlights on the floor. With AI demand accelerating globally and our recent Asia supply chain checks continuing to show unprecedented demand, we view CES this year as kicking off a new AI consumer age as the masses now start to head down this AI Revolution golden path.”
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia and a Pied Piper of AI, will deliver his annual keynote on Monday, which is technically the day before the show officially opens. (It wraps up Thursday.)
Huang’s comments are apt to move the market, Ives believes, and Nvidia’s stock (up more than 1,300% in the past five years) attests to his potency as a prognosticator. Nvidia aside, this year’s CES will be “one of the most important moments” for AI of late, in Ives’ view, with recognition now fairly universal that the arrival of AI is a “paradigm shift that is still in the early days of playing out.”
One new initiative that attests to how the paradigm shift is affecting the film community is a new venture announced last May by Cannes’ Marché du Film and the CTA. They are launching a new innovation award for or companies, startups, entrepreneurs and filmmakers developing transformative tech in filmmaking, production, and distribution.
While the creative community is grappling with the implications of AI, advertising has fully embraced the technology.
Netflix’s larger profile at CES, which will see the company host a “speakeasy” happy hour event for advertisers, tech vendors, media members and others, stems from its push into advertising over the past three-plus years. Traditionally, certain highly successful tech companies like Netflix, Apple and others, have eschewed the trappings of giant booths spanning tens of thousands of square feet, leaving that practice to Sony Corp., Samsung, Panasonic and other gadget makers. But as the WBD deal has shown, Netflix is a nearly 30-year-old leopard that is more than willing to change its spots.
Many upfront conversations take root at CES, a fact that has motivated Disney to host a “tech and data showcase” at the show. Amazon Ads, meanwhile, has a large footprint inside the Aria Resort & Casino, which is home base for a range of stakeholders in the ad business. Fox Corp., WBD, NBCU and other sellers of both linear and streaming ads are leaning into tech, with execs speaking on panels before wining and dining clients at night.
Also inside the Aria, Medialink parent United Talent Agency has a stake in the ground at CES, convening a series of panels about the collision of entertainment and technology under the “Future Decoded” banner.
The march of technology gives a lot of writers, directors and actors in Hollywood reason for concern, especially with the major above-the-line unions set to start contract negotiations with studios and streamers in the coming weeks. SAG-AFTRA, which has prioritized CES in recent years, co-hosting the Labor, Innovation and Technology Summit with other unions during the Las Vegas show, is recalibrating this year. In place of its Las Vegas presence, the union plans to take other opportunities later in the year to get its message out, along with preparing for the contract talks, which are likely to be as thorny as they were in 2023, when both SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America went on strike.
Elsewhere on the CES docket, FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson and FCC Chair Brendan Carr will conduct “fireside chats” on Thursday morning. Both should be closely tracked given the scrutiny of pending mergers like WBD’s with Netflix or Paramount, as well as Nexstar and Tegna. plus the state of play of a long-discussed breakup of Big Tech titans.