Spike TV and Yahoo will partner for live, all-access coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Tuesday, unveiling new products and providing all the latest news from the world's largest technology conference.
Spike, which took a similar approach to last August's E3 show in Los Angeles, aleady had planned on six and a half hours of live coverage, five of which would be broadcast on the Spike network. Now that same video will air on the Yahoo homepage.
"Our mission is to empower people to see things first, empower our audience with new information, and we have realized that the digital part of a guy’s life is bigger than ever — how he uses cellphones, computers, videogames, apps, social networks and so on," Jon Slusser, SVP of multiplatform programming at Spike, told TheWrap.
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"We're taking cultural moments — moments that define what a guy's life will be like in future — — and blowing up in-depth coverage of those events."
Spike's hosts will interview figures from major tech companies like Microsoft (XBox Live) and Google TV), as well as celebrities in attendance like 50 Cent and LL Cool J. It will also get the exclusive opportunity to reveal new products from Sony, Toshiba, Polaroid and many more.
There will be five hosts, all of whom Slusser said is an expert in technology, media, video gmaes or all of the above. He described the coverage as mimicking a sporting event, which is appropriate since CES is known as the Super Bowl of tech.
Spike and Yahoo's partnership includes the integration and showcase of IntoNow, a second screen application developer that Yahoo purchased in April.
Adam Cahan, the CEO of IntoNow under the Yahoo umbrella and a former executive at MTV and Google, will appear to present the product.
Spike's hosts, like iJustine, will use it to talk with viewers and the program will utilize it to conduct live audience polling.
"This is a way of being able to share what youre' watching, see waht your friends are watching and share experiences in real-time," Slusser said. "This is all about live TV."
CES officially begins Tuesday, which is why Spike is concentrating its programming on that day. It will launch similar all-access coverage for this year's E3 convention and Comic Con.
"We don’t think of them as business-to-business conferences," Slusser said. "Comic Con is a cultural event. They are not business conferences or conventions. Those are accurate but do not truly describe what's going on there. On Tuesday there will be 150,000 people at that show."