The CES – Consumer Electronics Showcase is currently going on in Las Vegas right now – where consumer tech manufacturers get to display the new year’s models and send us mere mortals salivating – or spending our tax refunds in advance, either/or.

There are two particularly interesting things at this year’s CES that might be worth a little discussion. The first is the Linksys by Cisco brand, which is creating consumer gadgets – including a wireless home audio system that uses 802.11n, and a home-server called the Cisco Media Hub. Rather than waiting for consumer products to add network support; Cisco apparently found it easier to add consumer support to their network products.

The second is that there are a lot of devices which are bringing streaming Internet video content to the television – without a PC in the middle. When one company comes out with a new feature, it’s usually a fad or an attempt to forcibly create a new standard. When four – in this case, Sharp, Samsung, Panasonic and LG – all come up with the same idea at the same time, it’s usually a sign that the new standard has arrived.

The strange thing is that this will feed demand for high definition video content; demand which will probably primarily come via the Internet.

The reason is simple: For most titles, for most consumers and for most distributors, it is faster to get high definition content via broadband than it is to get it via “meatspace.”

While there is a saying that you should never underestimate the bandwidth of a semi truck filled with hard drives, neither should it be overestimated. A BluRay movie is 50GB per disc. For the consumer, going to the local video store and renting a copy of the video is, perhaps, a half hour, round trip, for acquisition. But when the video is not in stock, it must be special ordered. Even if the order takes only a few days, by then, even 50GB can be downloaded via broadband speeds.

Of course, that’s just the effort on the consumer end. Bandwidth is expensive, yes. But it keeps getting cheaper. Compare that to the costs of manufacturing and distributing video, which tend to go up over time.

There’s another factor at work – that is, paradoxically, high definition video has been more quickly adopted by indie filmmakers, working with cheap consumer and prosumer HD cameras and distributing via YouTube, than with major studios and television companies, who have large budgets sunk into legacy SD equipment. HD is finding a foothold first and foremost on the Long Tail, where physical distribution is impractical, but where Internet distribution is practical. When Internet streaming is the only way to get some HD content, it’s likely that it will be the preferred way to get all HD content.

What this means is that the networking solutions needed for the enterprise and needed for the home are blurring – probably one of the reasons that Cisco is so keen to get into the consumer market at the same time that it works on solutions which optimize video transcoding. It also means that people will soon take it for granted that you can download large video files when requested – like they can at home. This is not a daunting scenario, but you do need to monitor your network in order to manage the new demand that online HD content will create.