Sony is skipping next year’s Consumer Electronics Show, bringing an end to the company’s long-running presence at the Las Vegas technology show as it increasingly focuses on entertainment, intellectual property and technology for creators. A Sony spokesperson confirmed to Bloomberg that neither the company nor its affiliates plan to exhibit at the event in January, following an earlier report by Nikkei.
Sony said it continuously evaluates its approach to events and communications based on the needs and priorities of its various businesses. The company’s focus has increasingly evolved towards entertainment, intellectual property and technology designed to support creators, which was already evident in its more recent CES presentations.
An End Of An Era
Sony’s products were displayed at the inaugural CES in 1967, although the company itself says it first exhibited at the show in 1977, when CES was still being held in Chicago. Over the decades, the company became one of the event’s most recognisable exhibitors, regularly drawing large crowds with major product announcements and keynote presentations.
With Sony now stepping away from CES, here are some of the presentations and announcements that helped define its long relationship with the event:
1971: The U-Matic VCR Premiere
Sony’s U-matic format was among its early milestones in the videocassette era. The format was launched in 1971 and was primarily aimed at professional and institutional users due to its relatively high cost and size, rather than being a mass-market home video product. Nevertheless, the technology represented an important step towards cassette-based video, with Sony subsequently developing the Betamax format for the home market in 1975.
1982: The First Commercial CD Player
One of Sony’s most significant early CES showcases came at the Summer CES in 1982, when the company created a futuristic “Future Corner” featuring a spaceship and showed off the CDP-101, the world’s first commercial CD player.
The player arrived as Sony and Philips were establishing the Compact Disc format, with the CDP-101 eventually launching in October 1982. Sony also showcased its Mavica prototype at the same CES, an early still-image camera that recorded images onto floppy disks.
1991: The Nintendo “PlayStation”
Everyone loves a good Cinderella story. One particularly memorable moment came at the Summer CES in 1991, when Sony and Nintendo publicly presented their proposed collaboration involving a Super Famicom/SNES-compatible system with a CD-ROM drive. The device was referred to as the “PlayStation”, although the partnership ultimately fell apart soon afterwards.
Sony’s own history confirms that the two companies had been working on a CD-ROM-based Super NES system before the collaboration ended. The failed partnership therefore became an important part of the story behind the company’s eventual entry into the games console market, launching the original PlayStation in 1994.
2020: Vision-S Drives Onto The Stage
Sony’s CES 2020 presentation was a major departure from the company’s traditional consumer electronics showcases. Instead of focusing solely on televisions, cameras and other devices, Sony unveiled the Vision-S electric vehicle prototype as part of an effort to demonstrate its imaging, sensing, AI, telecommunications and entertainment technologies for mobility.
The prototype eventually led to Sony’s mobility ambitions and, later, its joint venture with Honda. The partnership produced the Afeela brand and several CES appearances, although Sony and Honda ultimately discontinued development of the planned Afeela vehicles in 2026.
2024: An Afeela Controlled By A PS5 Controller
Before the partnership’s discontinuation, Sony’s automotive push reached another memorable CES moment in 2024, when Sony Honda Mobility president and COO Izumi Kawanishi used a PlayStation 5 DualSense controller to remotely drive an Afeela prototype onto the stage. That same presentation arguably offered a glimpse of the direction Sony would continue taking beyond traditional consumer electronics.
