LAS VEGAS — Adopting a genial and occasionally evangelical tone, Sony Corp.'s chief operating officer Kunitake Ando keynoted the opening of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) here Thursday (Jan. 9) by calling for a "global open standard" for broadband technology based on an advanced Linux platform under development by Sony that will "smash barriers" between industries, technologies and applications.

Ando warned the assembled consumer electronics industry representatives that broadband interconnectivity is a tsunami that could sweep them away unless they work together on industry-wide open standards.

The Sony executive also said that implementing high-definition digital video technology into connectable products ranging from mobile phones, personal computers and televisions to DVD camcorders and even home robots represents a "frontier in the real sense. We are all going to have to adapt quickly to this dramatic paradigm change," he said.

"This wave is coming fast," he added. "As difficult as it may be, we need to collaborate now for our mutual success in order to realize our broadband dreams."

Ando acknowledged during a subsequent Q&A session that Sony is no longer actively working on Aperios, the once much-touted distributed operating system internally developed at Sony. Despite "a CE consortium" that Sony established with Matsushita Electric Corp. and Toshiba Corp. to further develop Aperios, an Internet-driven networking environment and Microsoft Corp.'s .Net initiative have become prevalent, Ando said. "Aperios was an operating system of a pre-Internet age and we decided that it isn't adequate for the future," he said.

Turn to Linux

Sony now has a team of engineers design an advanced version of the Linux operating system. "A number of major consumer electronics manufacturers such as Samsung, Philips and LG Electronics — except for Toshiba — are joining this open platform initiative," Ando said.

Ando's call for inter-industry collaboration was a slight departure for Sony, a long-time format warrior. But Ando emphasized that consumer electronics in the broadband age must free consumers to use video and audio content as liberally as possible, and that new technologies must allow them to mix and manipulate all the digital content at their disposal.

Ando pulled out all the Sony stops for his keynote, which included an appearance by actress Drew Barrymore, who will star in Sony's "Charlie's Angels" sequel, and vocals by Sony recording artist Mary Mary, who danced with Sony's new two-legged household robot. (So far, Sony's Aibo robot is the only consumer electronics device using Sony's homegrown Aperios OS.)

Power to the user

Although, ironically, consumers have never been allowed to attend the Consumer Electronics Show — the biggest trade show of its kind in the United States — Ando repeatedly promised more power to the consumer. "Users will be the new stars," he said, "and they will control their environment to maximize the value of the network."

The key to this consumer takeover, said Ando, will be the TV set. It will be connected wirelessly to personal computers and other devices through a Sony technology called RoomLink, Ando predicted, and to outside networks through such technologies as Sony's Passage, which was recently licensed to cable provider Charter Communications.

Passage is a new technology Sony has developed to allow cable operators to add the second conditional access system to their legacy systems without costing them too much bandwidth. "By using Passage, it takes cable operators to use up only two to ten percent of additional bandwidth," said Gregory Gudorf, vice president of business planning at the Sony Technology Center (San Diego).