For the last 25 years, about 1000 engineers from all regions of the world have gathered at the annual IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE) in Chicago to review and discuss the emerging technology trends in the consumer industry.

On May 14, Hitachi, Panasonic, Philips, Grundig, Sharp, Sony, Thomson Multimedia, and Toshiba announced that they have compiled a core home-networks specification for AV electronics appliances. The eight companies plan to actively promote this spec, called HAVi (Home Audio-Video interoperability), as a home-network standard for the AV electronics and multimedia industries.

Several manufacturers will be demonstrating state-of-the-art home-theater products at HI-FI '98, some of which have never been seen by the public before.

On April 30, General Instrument Corporation and DIVA Systems Corporation signed a letter of intent defining an agreement to market DIVA's OnSet video-on-demand (VOD) service on GI's DCT-1000 and DCT-1200 interactive digital-cable set-top boxes. This joint effort will enable cable operators who use the GI system to commercially deploy an OpenCable-compliant implementation of the OnSet VOD service by this fall.