Keep an eye on video for this year's gadget highs

Technofile: Every year gadget fans congregate at two huge exhibitions to gawk at the latest electronics. In Europe it's the legendary CeBit in Germany, while in the United States, it's time again for CES - otherwise known as the Consumer Electronics Show.

Starting this week in Las Vegas, CES promises to showcase a plethora of new electronic gizmos which will be hitting our shores over the next year.

To give you an idea of the size of the event, around 120,000 people from around the world are expected to attend.

It covers 1.5 million square feet of exhibit space at the Las Vegas Convention Centre.

Among the products on show, the hard drive based video recorder, brought into the world by US firm Tivo, is being given a new lease of life. Anyone with a hard-drive video recorder like SkyPlus will know about the advantages of only needing to watch what your video hard drive records for you. Tivo goes one better - it literally learns what you like to watch.

Tivo introduced their digital or personal video recorder (PVR) six years ago. Tivo now plans to start rolling out TivoToGo. This lets subscribers transfer video recorded on their home Tivo digital recorders to portable laptop computers and eventually handheld devices.

The technology is reminiscent of a solution being planned by a firm closer to our shores.

This year the British firm Pace Digital, which makes digital TV boxes, is planning its PVR2GO.

This is a portable device which boasts a high resolution display and allows you to transfer video recorded on your home PVR and watch it while out and about.

Missed the match last night and don't have time to watch it?

Watch it on the train into work with a PVR2GO - well, that at least is the marketing pitch.

But back to CES. Tivo's move represents the big trend in consumer entertainment technology.

The buzz-words at CES are "space shifting" or "place shifting" - giving people the ability to watch their favourite TV shows anywhere and on any device.

Also competing in the digital video market is the Slingbox Personal Broadcaster, which streams live or recorded TV shows from home to a networked computer, whether in another room or in another country.

Orb Networks will produce software that streams live or recorded TV, photos or other media stored on a home PC out to portable devices such as a laptop.

You will no doubt have heard about the feverish buzz around portable music players like the iPod. Well, this year it's all about video - whether it's from your TV, downloaded from the internet, or streamed to your mobile phone. That issue is going to pit massive IT firms against the big "consumer appliance" makers.

And CES is now so important not just to consumer firms like Samsung or Sony that the IT giants, like Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina, are also due as speakers.

This just goes to show how the worlds of computers and IT are merging with the worlds of consumer electronics, media and entertainment.

Intel, for instance, plans to showcase wireless laptops running on a new Centrino mobile chip technology code-named Sonoma.

This will allow "consumers to enjoy their digital home experience beyond the four walls of the home", says the company, rather coyly.

Ultimately all these devices are about home networking, the new battleground for both entertainment and IT companies.

So, you may as well start by swotting-up on the vocabulary, like "home media servers" which store digital media such as audio, video and photo files, and have the means to distribute those files to other devices.

It's the gadget space to watch this year.