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.