Although E3 has become the premier launching pad for all things video games, Microsoft spent a significant amount of its final keynote address at last year’s CES touting the place of Xbox in the home entertainment landscape. Gaming consoles could very well be the ultimate smart TV upgrade by providing Internet access and a pipeline for media through an ever-expanding app selection.

Xbox in particular has amassed a large array of pay-for-use apps include Netflix and HBO Go, but the company has also recently added offerings from Maxim, who have their eyes set on original programming, Crackle and ESPN. Not to mention the Kinect’s ability to provide voice and gesture control in addition to video chatting.

It will be interesting to watch the counter-attack from rival high-tech set-top streaming boxes like Roku as well as smart TV manufactures as they respond to these advances into their domain.

An interesting side-effect of E3’s popularity with the bigger game and console developers is that smaller companies often take advantage of CES as a time to showcase forward thinking peripheral devices and novel gaming platforms that could be adopted by larger companies or hybridized into other devices. Some of these technologies were on full display last year, such as gestural control of entertainment media or eye tracking for more effective autostereoscopy.

CES isn’t known for groundbreaking digital camera releases, but, like the game industry, the next-gen sensors and hardware involved could eventually find their way into devices like televisions to enable video chatting or smartphones to continue blurring the line between camera and phone.

Last year premiered the first generation of Android-based point-and-shoot cameras, but this year could be the true dawn of the connected camera. The Samsung Camera is the best pre-show example of the merger of mobile operating systems with cameras as well as the integration of communication technologies like Wi-Fi or NFC. These new connections, along with the development of 4K capable cameras with video, could lead to a new breed of hybrid media devices that can shoot, edit and post movies all at once.