The elephant in the room at CES is clearly HD-DVD, or rather the shadow of the grim reaper cast long across its body.

No one wants to pronounce the format dead and Sony – king of Blu-ray – even went as far as saying “we’ve not won”, although it oddly sounded like a declaration of victory.

What many here in Vegas have missed – being so deeply embedded in the show – is the news that Paramount is probably poised to abandon HD-DVD, too, thanks to a get out clause that enables it to switch sides in the event of Warner Brothers backing Blu-ray.

If this is the case then HD-DVD is almost certainly a lost cause but Sony et al look as though they’ll be magnanimous in victory. Sir Howard Stringer, chief executive of Sony, is reported as saying he was “open to dialogue” and that, "We are not going to push people around. We have a lot of work to do to grow the market.”

This translates as something along the lines of: “Okay, so HD-DVD’s dead, but we’re now left without an excuse as to just why the next gen DVD market has failed to take off.” The story still has a long way to go.

Anyone who has ever attended a trade show knows the feeling – it goes by many names but can be summed up by two words: tradeshow fatigue. And you could see it in the eyes of both attendees and exhibitors here in Las Vegas today. Sore feet, heads and eyes combined with adrenaline and coffee – was there ever a more ruinous combination?

But we keep coming back because there’s really nothing quite like that trade show experience, even if it's sometimes pretty painful.

Same time next year…