The GOAL of CEA Line Shows

A roar went up at around 11:45 a.m. Wednesday, emanating directly from one corner of the 11th Floor of 7 West 34th St. in New York on the second day of CEA Line Shows. Were attendees excited about Vizio's new 3D TVs, Monster's “Tron”-affiliated headphones, or the new features announced in a keynote by Skype?

Most of them were. But the reason for the roar was the same as the reason for roars that went up at the same time in bars, offices and living rooms all over the country- Landon Donovan scored a goal in the 92nd minute of the U.S. national team's FIFA World Cup match against Algeria, breaking a scoreless tie and sending the U.S. into the tournament's Round of 16.

A major attraction of the shows was a presentation of Sony's new 3D televisions, which were showing a World Cup match each afternoon that was broadcast on the new ESPN 3D channel. I caught the demo on Tuesday, for the South Korea/Ghana match, and was quite impressed- the players (and ball) stick out while the grass doesn't, making the pitch look sort of like a giant foosball table.

The U.S. match Wednesday wasn't shown in 3D, but Sony was nice enough to broadcast it anyway for those in attendance. As an industry executive said on the 3D @Home panel later that day, Sony's new 3D TVs, when showing non-3D channels, are still among the best 2D TVs on the market.

If you're an NFL fan who's been to CES, you've seen a similar scene; the playoffs always fall on that weekend, so on the Saturday afternoon of the show it's common to see large crowds of (mostly) men surrounding TVs on the show floor to catch the action. The difference at Line Shows was, it was a different kind of football- and everyone watching was on the same side.

I had a break in my schedule in the morning so I gave some thought to ducking out of the show for an hour or so to watch the match, preferably in a bar full of drunken Englishmen, but decided to stick around the show floor. As the match went on, the crowd near the Sony display just got bigger and bigger, until by the 80th minute or so that side of the hall was jam-packed, cheering on every one of many near-goals by the U.S.

Then, when Landon Donovan finally scored in extra time, pandemonium broke loose. Exhibitors high-fived distributors, who high-fived journalists, who high-fived PR agents. It's a scene that replicated itself nationwide, as clips of fan reactions to the goal quickly became a YouTube phenomenon (as seen here, here, and here). And unlike Major League Baseball and the Olympics, FIFA and its broadcast partners, thankfully, don't immediately move to block all authorized video clips. Twitter was a joy as well, that is, until it crashed for the entire hour after the goal.

Has anything like this happened in recent American history, with spontaneous celebrations all over the country? I can only think of one example.

I'm a reformed soccer hater – an old blog post of mine, for several years, came up at the top of Google searches for “Soccer Sucks”- who was converted to the cause after reading Franklin Foer's great book “How Soccer Explains the World.” Now I get up every Saturday for eight months of the year to watch the English Premier League and my favorite team, Tottenham Hotspur.

I've been awaiting the World Cup for months because I was really hoping it'll start to nudge the popularity of soccer in the U.S. upward. The excitement brought about by the Donovan goal and the rapturous reaction that greeted it- hopefully coupled with a run far into the knockout round- may finally bring that about.

In the coming days and weeks, we're going to be posting a series of more than two dozen videos that we took at Line Shows to E-Gear.com and our other websites. If, in the background of one of them, you should hear a loud roar, you'll know where it came from.