As tech companies cancel events into 2021, Consumer Technology Association says next January's CES will take place “both physically in Las Vegas and digitally”
time to herd everyone into giant rooms full of screens, robots and drones during a deadly pandemic https://twitter.com/... X A-Xii Mims / @mims : The only way this works is if we have immunity passports by January https://www.theverge.com/... Casey Newton / @caseynewton : CES stands for Coronavirus Electronics Show and the price of entry is now moderate to severe risk of hospitalization. still worth it to see the new LG smart refrigerators in person https://twitter.com/... Marques Brownlee / @mkbhd : CES is literally the worst case scenario 100,000+ people flying in from all over the world Everyone touches the same stuff and shakes hands for a few days Then everyone flies it back home There's a reason there's already a flu named after CES. Should probably cancel this one https://twitter.com/... Sean Hollister / @starfire2258 : Wishful thinking. Mobile World Congress repeatedly insisted it would not cancel... until it did. https://twitter.com/... Ed Zitron / @edzitron : Honestly the CTA should have cancelled CES months ago, and holding it with no vaccine or antiviral is irresponsible. They're gonna get lots of people really sick https://www.theverge.com/... Alex Kantrowitz / @kantrowitz : I hope the hot new product is a vaccine https://www.theverge.com/... Lance Ulanoff / @lanceulanoff : This is both hopeful and a little scary. https://www.theverge.com/... @rdrv3 : A few serious #CES2021 thoughts. 1. President of CTA is a known Trump bootlicker. The timing here is not a coincidence, they chose this week for a reason: Trump is under siege and looking for allies. CTA hopes he'll boost for them as an example of America returning to normal. Tony Romm / @tonyromm : sure, let's pack a billion people into a confined space just to look at the same TVs https://www.theverge.com/... Dan Seifert / @dcseifert : that's a no from me, dogg https://www.theverge.com/... Dave Zatz / @davezatz : haha hell no. was a breeding ground for horrible annual viruses even before covid. also f that elon musk tunnel boon dongle - extend the monorail. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
With tech companies canceling events well into 2021, the Consumer Technology Association is holding the line on its flagship show, saying next January's CES will run both physically in Las Vegas and digitally. The reaction in the piece itself is blunt: commenters flag that a show drawing 100,000+ international attendees is close to a worst-case pandemic scenario without something like immunity passports.
The bet didn't hold: within two months CTA reversed course and made CES 2021 all-digital, and when the show eventually returned to Vegas in 2022 it did so under visible strain — big names like Google and Microsoft canceled in-person plans, forcing the show to end a day early.
First-order effects
- Exhibitors, buyers, and press face a planning dilemma right now: commit budget and travel to a physical Vegas floor that CTA insists is happening, or wait for the digital track that CTA has just committed to alongside it.
- Las Vegas hospitality — hotels, venues, airlines feeding the show — gets a conditional reprieve only if the hybrid format survives; every other canceled 2021 event makes CES's promise the outlier, not the template.
Second-order effects
- Rival trade shows such as Mobile World Congress are watching whether CES can pull off any physical attendance at all; if CTA folds again, the pressure on every organizer to default to virtual-only becomes near-unavoidable.
- A credible digital CES creates a substitute good: exhibitors can reach press and buyers remotely, which lowers the cost of skipping future physical editions and weakens the floor-space economics CTA depends on.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — insistence, reversal, then a shrunken return — mega-trade-shows restructure around smaller, safety-hedged physical cores plus permanent digital layers, with exhibitor counts as the honest measure of recovery rather than headline dates on a calendar.
The trend: The pandemic is forcing the biggest tech trade shows from fixed physical gatherings into hybrid formats whose viability each organizer must prove year by year, with CES as the bellwether.