Live from Vegas: the future of sports entertainment.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: SPORTS biz

I have seen the future of televised sports, and it's going to look amazing on your wall. The only thing is, you're going to need a bigger house.

How else to accommodate the mother of all TV sets, a 150-inch, flat-panel, high-definition screen that literally is big enough to show a life-sized image of an elephant, trunk to tail? (And quite possibly, the backside of Baltimore Ravens lineman Jonathan Ogden, who tips in at 345 pounds.)

The monstrosity that Panasonic trotted out last month in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show dominated an exhibit floor packed with gadgets, devices, accessories, flashing signs, women with placards and every other sort of attention-getting entry in the modern entertainment and media ethos.

There were handheld video cameras that spit out high-definition images, thumb-sized flash memory drives expansive enough to store movies, sunglasses that project video from your iPod into a virtual screen somewhere just beyond the bridge of your nose (instant headache, by the way) and an uncountable number of electronified instruments vying for favor.

For sports fans, the annual show and the immersive media world it promises represents a sort of man-cave nirvana, where it now appears perfectly plausible to imagine a good share of the rest of your life will be spent staring slack-jawed at crisp displays of third-and-long conversions projected onto screens bigger than you'll find at the movie multiplex.

Sports aren't the only propellant of the new consumer electronics domain. High-definition DVDs and the virtual reality created by graphically rich video games are big instigators for sales of HDTV sets, too. But sports are a primary theme of the modern electronics progression and the new capabilities in television interactivity that go along with it. A tacit symbiosis prevails: Inventors dream up evermore exotic ways to satisfy fans, and fans willfully subsidize every newfangled screen, delivery mechanism and picture-clarity enhancement there is. If it has buttons, batteries and box scores, we'll take it.

How else to explain this unassuming oddity on display at CES: a palm-sized display device that does nothing but capture baseball box scores from some invisible ether and displays them on a digital readout. In an age when seemingly every sports statistic...