Tech it out, sports fan.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: SPORTS biz

THE ANNUAL INDUSTRY FORUM FOR THE DISPLAY of electronic gadgets that are better than stuff von bought last year concluded last month in Las Vegas, and if even only some of the trend indicators come to pass, you, sports fan, are in for some serious sensory stimulation.

The international CES (formerly Consumer Electronics Show) is an exhausting week of hurrying and scurrying past a city's worth of displays and booths from technology titans like Sony and Samsung, punctuated every li*w hours; by learned pontification from industry big shots who appear on panel sessions and in keynotes speeches.

The GES isn't a sports industry event per se, but anymore, just about every device that plugs in, draws power from a battery, has twinkling indicator lights or features a video screen relates to watching. tracking or conversing about sports. With that in mind, here's a sports-themed review of four electronics technologies that could change the way you experience spectator sports in the next few years.

Ultra HD.

That sweet flat-panel occupying an exalted space on die wall? It's so 2010. (What, you expected TV set manufacturers to abandon the whole orchestrated obsolescence thing?) The new buzz in television is Ultra HD, the emerging display standard that delivers images 4x sharper than those conveyed by today's U.S. high-definition screens. The rub for now is that you can only appreciate the eye-popping clarity--think Peyton Manning's fingernails digging into the rippled leather of a football - on screens that, at 84 inches, are too big for the average fan to accommodate. Manufacturers are working on smaller screens, but risk sacrificing their stunning video output by shrinking the viewing frame. That, and price tags of $20,000 and up. are likely to deter all but the most ardent of sports-videophiles for a few years to come. So you can hang on to your HI) for a few more seasons before your boastful neighbor goes all one-up on you.

Second-screen applications.

If you've watched live sports with anyone under 30 lately, you're probably clued in to the wild popularity of the so-called "simultaneous screen" movement, which is the television industry's fancy way of saving people use social media platforms from their smartphones to comment on the game while it's...