I believe Americans must retain the right to time-shift and place-shift lawfully acquired content within their private homes. That includes noncommercial recording of free over-the-air broadcasts or time-shifting a satellite radio program that you have paid for. If you agree with me, get active and visit the Home Recording Rights Coalition booth in the Central lobby.

By some measures the U.S. is falling behind other countries in broadband deployment, but I am optimistic. I see rapid growth in competition among broadband providers. If cable, telephone, wireless, broadcast, satellite and even power line compete to be the pipeline into the home, then consumers will enjoy falling broadband pipeline costs and vast choice of competing media services. However, we must be sure consumers also have unfettered access to content, services and applications. Openness and access have fueled the growth of the Internet, and we must reject models which rely on proprietary systems block access to competitive or disfavored websites or services. Innovation will flourish only if device manufacturers who develop "edge technologies" have certainty that their products and services, like new IP-based video, can connect to the Internet.

It has been said that owning content is a handicap for Sony, which is a company primarily dedicated to electronics. The recent copy protection issues at Sony BMG have once again brought this to the forefront. But it is surely too cynical to assume that Sony BMG was intent on punishing the consumer rather than protecting content and the rights of the artist. It is appropriate, I believe, for all of us to worry about content protection, even while recognizing that some of our efforts to address it may prove problematic.

Today, the relationship between content, technology and the consumer is being turned upside down. Or, more accurately, right side up. Content is no longer pushed at consumers. Content is pulled by them. Pulled when they want it. Pulled where they want it. How they want it. And often even in the precise format in which they want it. The whole world is essentially plugged in and turned on.

So on top of all these things, the industry has been doing a lot of work on open standards. Digital Living Network Alliance came together and has given us the ability to have that protection of content end to end, across a multitude of vendors' machines.

And, of course, interoperability. The thing we as consumers care most about. Will this stuff work together? As we redefined interoperability, it's allowed us to speed product development across the industry.

But despite all of this, what consumers really have today is an internet video experience that's largely experienced from a chair in front of a computer at a distance of two or three feet.

What I think consumers really want, and what they tell us they want, is online content on that big screen in their living room, in their bedroom, from the couch, or sitting on the bed.

And in order for us to deliver this, we have to integrate the big screen capabilities, the PC capabilities, and the Internet experience. When we do that, we will staff what consumers have been asking us to give them.

Well, today, Intel is introducing a new hardware platform to deliver that satisfaction. We call it Viiv. It's designed from the ground up for the digital entertainment experience.

So what is Viiv? It's a combination of hardware and software that delivers a new media experience.

There's three fundamental new features to this technology.

The first is that we've made the PC much more CE-like...

The second is we've incorporated Dual Core technology into the machines...

And together with Microsoft's Media Center Edition operating system, the new Viiv hardware and their software delivers a new baseline capability to handle digital media inside the home.

But there was the third and large missing piece, and that's content. The most important thing we've been doing in the last couple of years is working with the content industry to get premium content available in devices like these.

Ultimately, Viiv is all about enabling a new experience in the home. Putting the consumer in control.

Until I see evidence to the contrary, I'm going to keep saying that VIIV 1.0 is nothing but a logo. We could waste a lot of time speculating about what's in VIIV 1.5 and 2.0, but it's pointless IMO since nothing is set in stone until it ships.

Right now, if you look at consumer electronic devices--let's say I have a camera. They all have USB. I have a USB pocket hard drive, but I can't actually connect to that and have it store the pictures. Why not? The hardware could actually work with a little bit of modification, but the software has not been developed to do this. Now maybe two guys sitting here say, "Oh, I'll give you my photos if you give me yours." But they can't do that either--they're going to have to find a computer. So it's kind a hassle to have a computer in an auditorium like this.

Now if there are device manufacturer people here, I don't want you to say, "Oh, that's a great idea. I'll go implement it," because you won't think of all the things that you should do. That's the whole point about the Internet. People think of new things to do all the time, and you can't possibly think of all of them. So every manufacturer would have to implement every cool piece of software, and there's no point in that. You might as well have it done once. Instead, make devices flexible by supporting reasonable open standards for how they work. Imagine if you introduced a new Wi-Fi camera in 2007 and some very smart kid in Lithuania creates software so that you can actually share photos, and so all the nearby devices--telephones and different cameras around--can get the group photo so everybody doesn't have to take the photo multiple times, like all of you guys are doing. That would really save a lot of effort and would be really cool--but not every device manufacturer should have to think of that. We should really enable software people to do what they know how to do.

[Furthermore], you should be able to plug in devices anywhere and have them work. There's a lot of talk at this conference about having TVs connected to the Internet and connected to computers. Why can't you plug your TV into any convenient outlet--Ethernet, Wi-Fi, USB, whatever is handy--and have images displayed on there? Why does it matter if it's in your living room or wherever? In fact, what if you want your USB webcam to monitor your front door--shouldn't you just be able to plug it into a USB through an adapter into Ethernet, or into Wi-Fi, or whatever you happen to have in your house? It shouldn't be a big deal. It shouldn't require any software.

I'll give you just a few more examples. Why can't your Bluetooth cell phone start your car, given that your car already has a Bluetooth speakerphone built in? Why can't you use that to unlock your car instead of carrying your keys? There are a million things [like this, and] we're not going to think of all of them, but if we have good communication between these things, they'll really start to work well. The hardware we have is amazing. It can do tons and tons of stuff. Your Bluetooth car is probably near a cell phone most of the time. Why doesn't it download latest repair information automatically? It would be easy to do.

One wire should do everything possible. If you plug a wire into something, you should be able to do anything you could possibly do with that device--run software on it, charge it, power other devices from its battery, or whatever, just with that single wire. We could basically do that with the hardware we have. And it should work the same whether you plug that wire into your house, your neighbor's house, or all the way around the world.

All the devices at CES, as I mentioned, have keypads and screens and things like that, if you look around. Now why is there no standard for those little screens and keypads? I'd like to have the ability to buy a little touch screen. It'd probably cost about $50 and I might plug it into my computer or Ethernet and here I've just decided I want to use it as an alarm clock. Let's say I plug it into my wall and since it has Bluetooth, and it's talking to my computer and shows what time I need to wake up based on the meetings I have. Maybe it can also show you your music and let you control your stereo. But whatever the software people figure out what to do, that display should do it. It doesn't need to necessarily have a speaker built in, because maybe my computer wakes me up instead of the alarm clock. I'm amazed that we don't have devices like this--and the reason we don't is because we lack standards to do it.

Another example [slide of a pile of adapters and cords]: these are the power adapters just lying around our office. I'm sure most of you have things like this under your desk too. It's a real hazard. You could electrocute yourself--if one in a million adapters catches fire and you have a thousand adapters, it starts to be an issue. And it's also a big hassle for the manufacturers because every one of those devices now has this thing that's in the box that's specific to a country. And so they have to repackage the boxes and maintain stock for different countries. It's just silly, and also really inefficient, because guess what? They are sort of subsidized by the devices you buy, so people try to provide the cheapest ones possible. So they all suck power.

Why not instead standardize the power and have a basic [adapter device] so you can say, "I want 12 volts, 2 amps, give it to me." Then you can buy a really nice power supply that's really efficient, really small, is appropriate to the country you're in, and the consumer can pay for it instead of the device manufacturer so they'll have higher margins. Then we don't have that mess of cords. either. So I think we really, really do need standards in these areas.

So basically, most devices should be connected through adapters--and you can adapt anything to USB for like $20. (If you want to do video it's a little bit more expensive.) We have adapters for everything else already. Do you really need all these ports running around? I don't think it's necessary.

Let me show you a positive example: phones. You can plug any Bluetooth headset into any Bluetooth phone and it will work great. Here [shows slide] are some examples we found lying around the office. Charging is still an issue for these things, so you still need standard power.

So in summary, we really want to get all this stuff to work together. This is just of a personal passion of mine. What we really need are adapters like I mentioned. And also it's very important that we have standards for security, discovery, peering, and forwarding to the Internet. And we don't really have those things yet. We also need the standards, and there are some already that can be adapted for protocols. Now finally, as I mentioned, you can take USB and really do most of the things you need to do with it .

I'm going to just plead with all of you, let's get the power supply problems fixed, or let's get all these devices talking together. I think we'll get just amazing innovation, things we just totally can't predict happening, and also all of you as consumers will be a lot happier. Your devices will really just work, you'll be able to plug anything together that makes sense: if you need storage, or you need a bigger display on something, you just plug it in a display, or whatever you want to do. This is a really important thing to get done. We'd love to have help in doing this, or I'd love ideas from people. I thought I'd throw this out as something interesting to get people thinking about.