Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley details how the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show's (CES) is ending early after concerns over COVID case surges related to Omicron and companies like Meta, Sony, and Google pull out of the show as organizers opt to go virtual.

Video Transcript

- --and talk about CES which is ending a day earlier than they had planned. This is after several high profile of their sponsors and attendees have pulled out of the Las Vegas conference. For all the details, we want to bring in Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley. And Dan, was this really expected or kind of par for the course, now?

DAN HOWLEY: This was kind of unexpected, actually, coming out of CES 2022. You know, originally, the idea was for it to be in-person and virtual. There wasn't going to be too much of the usual that we would see from CES, whether that was in 2019 or any of the years prior, where it's this huge just throngs of people going through these different convention halls.

We were expecting there to be a virtual element for people who didn't necessarily feel comfortable in that situation just yet. But now, we've seen with Omicron that so many people have canceled, whether that's the likes of Intel, GM, Waymo. LG is going to have some people on the ground-- I'm sorry, some presentation on the ground, but no real employees. It's going to be kind of a walk through on your own. Samsung.

So all these different companies are making sure that they keep their staff safe. And that means pulling out of CES itself. We've also seen a lot of media pull out as well. So I think that you know for the show itself, it obviously hurts. For the local economy in Las Vegas, it hurts. This is one of the biggest shows that they have every year.

But I think overall, for the announcements themselves, we're still going to get largely what we expected. I don't think we're going to see anything as far as companies pulling back entirely from what they were expected to display. I just think that we're going to get it virtually and the news will still trickle out.

Obviously, we're going to be covering it very closely. And so we'll be able to provide that along with the, more importantly, context as to whether or not these pie in the sky ideas that you get out of CES will actually come true.

- Well Dan, that's kind of my question here. Just quickly, what are your big expectations or big themes that we're going to be looking for coming out of this changed CES?

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah. I think really for me it's that we're going to see a lot of the same. We're also going to see, though, you know, a little less hype, maybe. Because we're not going to have those same images or anything that you get of huge amounts of people around these massive walls of TVs or things along those lines.

But you know, for the average person, I think, if you're looking at CES and what it means for you, really the biggest ideas tend to come out of TVs. Obviously, this is their big kind of splashy event for the likes of Samsung and LG and Sony.

We're going to get different technologies for TVs whether that's 8K which is just ridiculous because you don't need something unless you have a 150-foot TV or some nonsense like that. But they do have cool technologies like micro LEDs. OLED obviously is still the best picture quality that you can get really for television.

Then outside of that, we're looking at cars. A lot of automakers have kind of used CES to make debuts for their technologies. And that's become increasingly important, obviously, for a lot of consumers. So that's something that really is worth looking at.

Then traditional companies, like Intel, Qualcomm, the likes of them, they will definitely be there and showing off some of their wares. But I think, for most people, the big attention grabbing stuff is usually the TVs and the automotive stuff, especially self-driving.

- You got it. And a little bit of a disappointment there. But hey, Davos was outright canceled. At least it's still going on there. Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley.