The C-word is back. Last week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has become *the* show for new media, and what’s driving it is convergence.

The C-word is back.  Last week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has become *the* show for new media, and what’s driving it is convergence.

In fact, despite the name, the star of the show this year wasn’t some gee-whiz new tech gadget but a raft of new ways for consumers to download, watch, save, and exchange their favorite songs, shows, and videos.  With announcement after announcement by leading content providers, Internet companies, and hardware makers, CES was a huge step toward that oft-discussed but long-unfulfilled vision of a converged world.  (Check out AOL’s announcement with Intel for just one example.)For the past decade, most media on the Internet has been stuck in the electronic equivalent of primordial ooze.  We knew that convergence would eventually come, but change came slowly.  Moore’s law continued to make chips faster, broadband adoption continued to grow, and new devices like cell phones and iPods continued to proliferate.  But the most important factor in laying the groundwork for a converged world has been social, rather than technological: a new generation of consumers who look at "new media" as THE media. With all those trends at work, you finally have a critical mass for media convergence to being in earnest.  It’s still really early in the adoption, of course.  Only a few million paid videos have been downloaded so far.  We’re not even at day one for that industry.  But videos are going to follow the same growth pattern as music, and the same thing was true of legal music downloads until a couple years ago.  This year, however, Apple announced that it will likely sell 1 *billion* songs online.  That’s good.  But even that industry is still in a very early phase of adoption. 

Nonetheless, I think we will look back and see this year as the tipping point when convergence was transformed from a hollow buzzword into a real consumer-driven trend.

The good news for AOL is that we’ve been working toward this goal for many years now, and it’s very rewarding to see our vision finally becoming a reality.  As Woody Allen said, 70% of success in life is just showing up, and companies like AOL have been showing up