CES: Striving for Control With Remotes

Most anyone who doesn’t walk to their TV set to change channels or the volume could argue that remote control is an oxymoron.

But help is on the way from vendors at the annual Consumer Electronics Show this week. They’ve developed radio frequency remotes for TVs that don’t require a clear line-of-sight path to operate.

Still others are demonstrating remote control technology and devices that actually put the control in the hands of viewers with remotes.

Advanced remote controls are seen as a huge piece of the interactive TV puzzle, which has been defined as a means of controlling content, voting and purchasing goods via a TV set. Today, polling allowed by TV shows in the U.S. is primarily done via text messaging from cell phones and PDAs.

Apparently, breakthroughs with handheld units used with video gaming systems have helped drive some of the innovation in remotes.

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