Brent Butterworth

This is not just another new video projection company. At least, that's the impression I got after hearing the pitch for Display Development, a firm founded by projection-industry veterans Jim Burns and Pat Bradley.

Technologies that distribute audio and video around a home are incredibly cool—if you can afford them, if you can tolerate complicated installation, and if you can figure out how to use them once they’re in. I’ve long assumed a big consumer electronics company like Samsung or Sony would invent a more practical multiroom A/V solution, but it seems the technology that finally gets us past the old paradigms may be Apple’s AirPlay.

Technologies that distribute audio and video around a home are incredibly cool-if you can afford them, if you can tolerate complicated installation, and if you can figure out how to use them once they're in. I've long assumed a big consumer electronics company like Samsung or Sony would invent a more practical multiroom A/V solution, but it seems the technology that finally gets us past the old paradigms may be Apple's AirPlay.

My greatest CES disappointment led to my greatest discovery. After a cable manufacturer bailed out on the bacchanalian dinner he’d promised me, I ended up at the New York New York hotel nursing a glass of watery house bourbon while dropping quarters into a video poker machine. I soon noticed that the man next to me was sketching electrical circuits on his napkin.