OPINION: Another January and another CES rolls into town promising more technological innovation but what, you might possible be asking, could it have in store for TV and audio?
If you read some of our articles over the festive period then you’d have already gleaned some nuggets of what I think 2025 will have in store, but I’m going to drill down into a few more specifics as to what’s likely to be revealed at CES 2025.
Another flagship Panasonic TV
I could copy and paste paragraphs from previous years and plonk it into this section and probably little will have changed. It’s CES 2025 and Panasonic will announce its latest flagship OLED.
Still, 2024 marked a big change in approach from Panasonic, dumping its My Home Screen interface and choosing Amazon’s Fire TV instead for the Z95A. This gave customers plenty more streaming apps and smart features, with the hope that it’ll open up Panasonic’s appeal to a more mainstream audience. It also resulted in a few Panasonic tellies being available in the US for the first time in years, but I digress.
I imagine that this new model will be called the Z95B, and that it’ll boast LG Display’s latest MLA screen technology that will boost brightness even further. It’ll come with a Technics sound system bolted onto its back that’s likely to be the best built-in sound system on any TV this year (and while I mention Technics, perhaps that’s a company that might be showcasing something too).
There’s a bit to speculate over but Panasonic has mostly been doing the same thing for the last six years or so, and while the GZ2000 was innovative back in its day, I’m hoping that Panasonic can do something new. It feels as if the TV market is taking incremental steps rather than big ones, and it’d be nice to see a company such as Panasonic be a force for innovation as it was in the past.
AI will dominate TV announcements
I’ve written about my misgivings on AI, not because it can’t be used as a force for good but that TV manufacturers have latched onto AI as a buzzword and revved up the marketing machine. The thing is, AI has been in TVs for a while, so it’s nothing necessarily new.
That won’t stop the majority of TV brands bigging up AI technology. Samsung is a big advocate for it, and you can expect more from the company on that front (including some very interesting things that I’m not allowed to talk about yet). In a general sense though let’s say Samsung’s picture quality will be powered by increasingly powerful neural networks (as it has done these past several years) and that I wouldn’t be surprised if audio gets an AI boost as well.
LG has also increased its use of AI with the technology that it launched in its 2024 TVs. While AI was used for picture and sound performance, it was prevalent in the services that LG offered, such as its AI Chatbot helper that could help solve issues you have with the TV. Expect more AI development on that front for its new TVs.
Sony will do something
I’ll be honest, I’m not entirely sure what Sony is going to do for CES 2025.
It’ll likely be a focus on TVs – Sony doesn’t tend to do audio announcements at CES – and if I had to guess, I’d speculate about the possibility of a new QD-OLED that could be called the Bravia 10 being announced. Aside from that however, I’m scratching my patchy beard about what it could do.
Currently its TV line-up goes to Bravia 9, and the only other models that have been announced have been the Bravia 8 and Bravia 7, so Sony has plenty of other numbers to fill out
There will not be many audio announcements
CES used to be a hub for audio announcements but that has slowed down in recent years. That’s not to say that there aren’t audio products there – the Venetian Hotel is where you’ll find the latest audio products from brands across the world – but big audio brands no longer announce flagship type products at the event.
Instead, CES has come to be dominated by emerging tech in the last ten years; streaming devices, smart assistants, AI, and so on, and that’s what you should expect as being the focus going forward. Even TVs on their own aren’t really a focus, it’s what’s inside them that brands are focusing on.
