FCC Chairman Michael Powell once famously referred to TiVo as “God’s machine.” I wouldn’t go that far, but having a DVR is pretty awesome. Watch when you want, pause live TV, never miss an episode of your favorite series. You collect TV shows, rather than just watching what happens to be on right this second.

But most television is based (in part) on advertising revenue and there has been much nervousness about DVRs, given the possibility that viewers might just skip through ads. A new study from Magna Global says otherwise, according to a story in Media Life Magazine:

As it turns out, almost all ads are still seen by TV viewers, either live or when shows are seen in playback. Ad-skipping is minimal.

About three-fourths of all commercials viewed in DVR homes are viewed live, meaning as a program originally airs.

When ads seen during DVR playback over three days from the original airing are added in, the share of ads seen by viewers rises to 97 percent, according to a new report from media buying giant Magna Global.

Further, the study found that for DVR-recorded ads, about half are viewed the same day as the original broadcast, and roughly 90 percent are watched within three days.

That could change as DVRs and their use become more common. As more shows are recorded, presumably fewer would be watched and fewer would be watched in the days immediately after they were recorded.

But with DVRs now in some 21 percent of all homes, most demographic groups watch the vast majority of recorded commercials within a few days, and it doesn’t vary much by age group.

I don’t have an up-to-date statistic, but SNL Kagan had previously estimated 11 million cable customers with DVRs for the end of 2007.

While most of my fellow CES attendees are staked out at the slots trying to get in a little more gambling, I’m staked out on the laptop cropping photos, and trying to get in one last post.  I had been looking for the cool, new toys here at the show and finally found some I think fit the bill.

As a dad, I dread the day my kids get old enough to want their own PSP or Nintendo DS.  I just know they’re going to lose them.  If the good folks at LeashTec have their way, maybe not.  The Game Leash (buy it online for about $13) tethers the device, Wii controller, or other tech toys to your tot.  Never lose another gadget or watch another nunchuk sail across the living room.

If you want to propose but wish the two months salary you shelled out for all that bling came with a case that would play a video or pictures set to “We’ve Had the Time Of Our Lives”, you’re in luck.  For an extra $200 bucks the Euricase will allow you to upload images or an MP$ and it will playback when the recipient opens the box.

Gaming chairs are all the rage and the show had plenty of them.  From the low end (on the bottom at $600) to the high-end closing on $15,000, you can get your chair configured with multiple displays, flight simulator controls, phenomenal audio, and a drink holder (not actually sure about that last one, but it would make sense.

The iDry is the next wave in clothes dryers (or so they hope).  Your clothes (up to 14 garments) hang in the tall nylon tube and air circulates around them.  It eliminates the need to iron, and doubles as a heather humidifier in the winter.  Warm air flows from what looks like a small space heater at the bottom and the warm moist air exits the top.  Run it in the summer with the heat off (it takes a little longer) and avoid the heating effect.  They expect it to retail for about $200 (much cheaper than that Maytag you’ve had your eye on).

The Argo Cinema 2 provides 3D DVD viewing through a set of personal glasses (similar to the MyVu’s I took a look at on Monday).  The entire set retails at $549 and includes the glasses, remote, and DVD player.  I’m not sure why a personal player needs a remote, but it has one.

Finally, 3DV, a company that apparently provides a lot of very cool stuff for filmmakers enters the consumer electronics field with what appears to be a typical webcam until you see it in action.  The camera in the picture above sits right under the TV.  It reads your body in 3D, strips out the background and puts you in the game (in this case boxing, but combine it with the Wii controllers and first-person shooters and the skies the limit).  It was cool to watch - like a new version of Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, but featuring a body that looks strangely familiar layered over Soda Popinski.  They expect the camera bundle to retail for around $100.

Well, my flight is boarding.  I hope these updates have given you a little glimpse into some of the newest tech toys at CES.

Even though this is a gadget show, content’s role at CES increases with each successive year. Which makes sense, because most consumers ultimately don’t care about technology, they care about what they can accomplish with it.

If you shell out for a new HDTV, what you care about is being to watch compelling hi-def programming. That’s one reason that Comcast’s Brian Roberts talked about putting 1,000 HD “choices” in customers’ homes by the end of 2008 (some media outlets erroneously reported this as 1,000 channels) and about rolling out a new system architecture by the end of the year that will let Comcast make half of 6,000 monthly On Demand movie options available in high definition.

(By the way, this is especially important for you if you paid a lot for your TV.  The Cox Digital Straight Talk blog reports that Panasonic has sold more than 3,000 of the 103-inch plasma displays they showed at last year’s CES, at a price of $51,000 each.)

The same goes for your home computer. If you can watch video, whether streaming or downloaded, then you want as many available choices as possible. I often assume that if I can watch a show on TV, then there must be some way for me to watch that same show online, but that isn’t always true.

That topic came up at the CES panel “The True Cost of DRM: What Can’t We Do Now?,” as it had earlier, with some comparison of digital rights management as it has evolved for music, as opposed to the current state of DRM for video.

[Russell Frackman, Partner, Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp] took issue with [American University's Patricia] Aufderheide’s singling out of Viacom. “What about the other side of the equation? How much are YouTube and Google going to pay?” he asked.

“They built a filter Viacom didn’t pay for,” countered [Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney Fred] von Lohmann.

That’s one way of looking at it: A streaming video service may not have paid for rights-controlled content, but the rightholder didn’t pay for the actions of tracking down their content and then taking it off the service.

The process of moving toward a future in which viewers can watch any piece of content ever made at any time on any device will be a slow, incremental process.  The amount of available content increases all the time and that’s a good thing for everybody.

Remember the PC versus TV debates of years ago? Even back then, I thought the correct answer was “both.” But the differences between the two devices blur more every year and they both end up being a box connected to a monitor that displays content.

One trend that’s of interest is the ability to connect your cable signal to your PC. For example, there was an interesting set-up at the Microsoft booth. A coaxial cable is plugged into the back of this ATI TV Wonder digital cable tuner, which is equipped with a CableCARD.

The signal then runs to the PC, running Microsoft’s Media Center. Then, thanks to an HP extender, the content can be run to a TV in another room; I’m also told that there are sets with embedded wireless extenders, so you just hang the TV up on the wall and be done with it.

The way this works is that you can now switch back and forth between cable television and the digital media on your hard drive. Watch TV, listen to MP3s, write e-mail, watch digital movies, or whatever. And every TV in your house can have access to that content, including the cable signal running through the one tuner, thanks to the extenders.

We have something like this set up in the “cableINNOVATES” exhibit back at the NCTA offices in D.C.

Let’s move to something a little less sophisticated, and yet elegant in its own way, the SanDisk TakeTV player. You may recall that last summer, NBC Universal decided to part ways with Apple and its iTunes Store. NBC is pursuing several different strategies for video distribution; for example, they are a backer of Hulu, a project mentioned in a panel Monday. In December, NBC announced a deal with SanDisk to distribute content through the Fanfare service. (Keep in mind that SanDisk is a huge player in Flash devices and competes strongly with Apple in the area of digital media players.)

After you browse through the shows on Fanfare, the DRM-protected content can be downloaded to your PC and then loaded to the Sansa TakeTV, a flash-based device that can be plugged into the USB port on your computer. Then you take the TakeTV out and pop it into the dock (seen at right), which is connected to your TV. A remote control allows you to pull up the content and make your viewing choice. Someone described it to me as a bit of a sneakernet approach to getting programming from the PC to the TV, but it seems to work pretty well.

Finally, there’s an approach that may already be headed for obsolescence, but might be an appropriate solution for some people, Hauppauge Digital’s TV receiver. As you can see in the left photo below, you run your cable into the back of the receiver. You then connect it to the PC through USB. The catch is that you can only tune to open QAM channels, and in today’s digital world, there are far fewer open channels than they used to be, and they’re only going to go away. However, you could also connect an antenna to the receiver and pull in digital television signals. If you were a college student in a dorm without cable service, that might be quite handy.

As you can see in the photo on the right, you can then watch TV, in a window or full-screen. You can also set up recordings, using the MPEG-2 format.

On Monday I mentioned the LimePC, a handheld-sized Linux based PC. I tried to get back that day to get pics, and couldn’t find the booth again. On my journey today, I stumbled upon it. Now I’ve got some details.

For a full-function PC, this thing is tiny. That’s a business card next to it in the pic below. The LimePC currently sports a 30, 80, or 100 GB drive and 256MB of RAM. They’re working to increase the RAM to 512. on the back it provides two USB 2.0 jacks, a standard VGA connector, 10/100 Ethernet, and power. The system they had running used a Bluetooth keyboard trackball combo leaving one additional USB. They have not yet settled on pricing.

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If you’ve never seen the t-shirt TV up close, it’s hard to fully appreciate it.  I first saw these in New York a couple of years ago, and they really do make you stop in your tracks.

From the picture at left, it’s hard to fully appreciate the technology.  What is essentially a flat panel TV is sewn into the shirt and delivers full motion video with whatever your message may be. 

They draw quite a crowd of onlookers and even more people taking pictures.

The t-shirt TV is the brain child of a guy named Adam Hollander with Brand Marketers.  Adam wasn’t available to chat, but his spokesmodels tell me you can hire the shirts for your promotions or just buy them outright.

Is this what the future of mobile marketing looks like?

Day two had me out wandering the show floor again. While Gizmodo and Engadget have been posting on everything from a pig shaped iPod dock to robot shaped iPod docks, I thought I’d look at stuff that I might actually buy or use (or play).

So here’s round two in the gadget run-down.

Bowers & Wilkins bring us the Zeppelin.  Bowers & Wilkins are known for making high-end audio components for recording studios, and they’re bringing that technology to iPod docking systems.  At $599, they cost more than most, but the sound they deliver is phenomenal.  They look like a big black pill with a bright shiny chrome belt wrapped around it - your iPod provides the buckle.

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FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin spoke today at CES and did a Q&A with Gary Shapiro, President & CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association. In his remarks, he talked about the coming Digital Transition, confirming that the “hard date” continues to be set in stone.

Actually, he remarked on a number of issues, but I’d like to zero in on comments he made towards the end of the session. The question of cable prices was raised and Chairman Martin reiterated remarks he has made on other occasions. He spoke of the increase in cable prices, which he characterized as too high, and said that “I’m doing everything I can” to increase competition, which he sees as a panacea. He said that prices in “almost every area” had decreased, although the examples he gave were from telephony and data services.

Gee whiz, where to begin?

Cable services, cell phone services. Apples, oranges. That’s one objection. Just to pick one aspect, the rise in prices is driven, in part, by increases in programming costs. A cell phone call isn’t going to ask for a salary bump next season.

Or maybe I should point out that comparing today’s prices with those of 1996 is a little goofy, given the small analog offering of ten years ago and today’s bundle of digital, high definition, and video-on-demand. There’s a factsheet on the NCTA website which compares 1995 to 2005 and finds that consumers were getting more channels, watching more cable programming and getting more value for their dollar.

This fits in with another good piece of research by Professor Steven S. Wildman of Michigan State University. He argued that the “real (inflation-adjusted) price of cable service divided by the number of hours spent watching basic cable programming” was a good way of measuring prices. If you pay 10 bucks for service and watch 10 hours, then you paid a buck an hour. If you pay 20 bucks and watch 60 hours, then you paid 33 cents an hour.

NCTA has also pointed out that cable’s bundle of video, high-speed Internet and voice service costs 23 percent less than ten years ago. Chairman Martin argues that a mandatory a la carte scheme will save money, but there’s plenty of evidence that suggests just the opposite.

Let’s just say we disagree and let it go at that.

I neglected to mentioned that Brian Roberts had three guest appearances as part of his presentation. Toshihiro Sakamoto, President of Panasonic AVC Networks Company, came out to talk about the two tru2way-enabled HD sets that will be available later this year, as well as the AnyPlay device. The ubiquitous Ryan Seacrest came out to chat up the new Fancast service and let slip a couple of colorful ad-libbed remarks that might have been of interest to fans of Kevin Bacon, Justin Timberlake and Andy Samburg.

Saving the best for last, the event was closed out by New Zealand’s fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo Flight of the Conchords. As seen in the photo, Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement showed off their integrated media center, which consisted of a disposable camera, taped to a cell phone, and then thrown on top of a TV equipped with rabbit ears (antennae augmented with foil).

They closed by singing their hit song of seduction, “Business Time.” You can see a video of them performing that song on another occasion.

UPDATE: I am reminded that they then added a toothbrush to their converged device by placing a toothbrush on top of the TV as well.

UPDATE #2: You can now see the video of their performance by clicking here and then fast-forwarding to the last 12 minutes.

I’ve been to CES a few times over the last five years. On my first few trips, it did seem a little odd to notice cable’s absence. Comcast Chairman & CEO Brian Roberts described a very similar experience in his keynote this morning, talking about walking the show floor a few years ago with Time Warner Cable’s Glenn Britt. As Roberts put it, “Cable was almost invisible.”

Following that experience, the cable industry reached out to the consumer electronics industry. He said that they heard complaints that cable was a regional business that operated in silos, that cable set-top boxes are closed and proprietary, and that, in general, cable made it too tough to innovate and to create products and services that could be sold in the retail environment. This morning’s address seemed a valuable pay-off to those efforts, with Roberts describing cable as a real partner to consumer electronics and retail.

He went on to describe the latest stage of his company’s development: Comcast 3.0. As part of the new Comcast, he said they were committing to a series of issues:

• Having the best fiber optic networks and IP infrastructure
• Delivering superior experience in hi-def and interactive
• Providing new levels of excellence in customer service
• Being a leader in innovation by providing “products and services that are converged, plug-and-play, user-friendly, and most important, easily open for third-party innovation.”

Many in the cable industry have debated over whether content is king or distribution. Roberts said that today the answer is clear: The consumer is king. The best way to serve consumers is by offering a wide array of choice.

He went on to profile such new services as wideband, Fancast, Project Infinity, the AnyPlay portable DVR, and the SmartZone communications center. You can read about the details elsewhere, but the important feature was that Comcast was preparing to offer more video that could be consumed in a more flexible fashion, more bandwidth and more features on its communications services. In a word: more.

On May 8th of last year, during NCTA’s annual Cable Show (also held in Las Vegas), Roberts demoed a DOCSIS 3.0 Cable Modem capable of delivering 160 Mbps using its “channel bonding” technology. You can see a video of that demo here and, as a sign of how far we’ve come over the last decade, you can also see Roberts demo a high-speed cable modem in 1996. Look at how fast the photos download! Check out the White House website!