In the past few years at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the buzz around the conference presentations has usually been about the next big hit electronics products. (CES was the venue for introducing the VCR, compact disc player and the DVD player.) In the conference presentations this year, you’d be hard pressed to pick a “hit product” –unless you are inclined to call the 150-inch TV a massive hit.

From my view, two of the most talked about “products” in the conference sessions at CES were openness and sharing. These concepts were mentioned over and over in sessions dealing with topics as diverse as multiplatform content delivery, personalized TV and next generation wireless. Speakers from well known (and not so open) companies like Microsoft, Comcast and Verizon were in a modest frenzy to demonstrate or at least pre-announce their openness and sharing plans. Microsoft proudly touted the number of developers using their IPTV platform to build consumer offerings, while reminding would-be developers that they still had to sell their inventions to the service providers before they would see the light of day.

Questions from the floor often addressed the level of anticipated openness and the sincerity of the open vendor. Questioners seemed to anticipate that as service providers slowly move to open their platforms, they may run the risk of violating hard won trust if they under deliver on these expectations for the New Openness.

Sharing as an offering appeared over and over, dressed as social media, widgets and cross device sharing of music, videos and all content forms. Underlying the prevalence of social media has been a significant shift in consumer time spent away from traditional devices. The magnitude of this time shift, led by the Net Generation, was unimaginable two or three years ago.

The sensitivity of the consumer electronics industry to the shift can be seen in the titles and descriptions for the presentation sessions at CES. Fifteen unique multiple speaker panels contain “social media”, “social networks” and/or “blogging” in the title. Seventeen include these terms in the description. Furthermore, I found that in virtually every session I attended (over 30 in total) multiple speakers mentioned these topics as well.

The consumers have voted with their time spent, for media where they are in contact and in control. Broad and narrow casting have formidable new competitors for each individual’s precious media minutes—competitors that create value through openness, sharing and mass collaboration.