Waking up from the holiday celebrations this morning, I realized that CES was now only four days away. To be honest, the last couple of years I had mostly lost interest in the show. Bigger TVs, almost identical wearable gear and more bluetooth speakers were making the show pretty boring.

2015 is a different story. Maybe it’s personal, but I feel that this year new technologies announced at CES will impact the home theater in a meaningful way. I can assure you that this time I’ll be following closely the announcements next Tuesday and reporting here as soon as possible.

While we wait for the event to take place, here are three things that are not official yet that I would like to see happen next week in Las Vegas.

1. Blu-ray 4K announced officially with support from all major studios / manufacturers

Since finally doing the move to 4K in the living room, while waiting for 4K projectors to become affordable (that could be another wish), I’m still waiting for a chance to watch a first feature film in 4K. You see, as a Canadian, options are pretty limited and the only 4K content I can watch right now is from Netflix and limited to their original TV series. Netflix streaming in 4K is nice, but it’s not pushing the envelope by any mean.

Last September, Blu-ray 4K has been announced for the end of 2015 with limited information. It would make sense to get a more detailed announcement at CES and hopefully see some players in action. It would also be good for the industry and for us consumers to see all major studios and hardware manufacturers agree on the format – nobody wants a limited number of releases or a competitive disc based format.

Yes movie streaming is becoming more and more interesting and Netflix is pushing strong with 4K support and Dolby Atmos coming soon, but I still think the opportunity window for a disc format is still open. Home theaters fanatics want high quality experiences and a full resolution 24/48 frame per second with object based audio Bluray 4K will be great news, to say the least.

To be honest, end of next year is also pretty late, let’s wish we’ll get a good surprise next week and see an earlier street date.

2. DTS:X confirmed and supported by a firmware upgrade on current Atmos receivers

The strange press release from DTS on the 30th of December about DTS:X was looking more than anything like a defensive move to stop Dolby Atmos receiver sales from home theater fanatics looking for something to buy with their holiday money. And looking at Twitter and forums, it may have worked as a lot of people are putting their purchase on hold until they hear more from DTS.

I imagine the initial strategy for DTS was to do the announcement next week at the show and it would be good to get more details about the format, it’s supported or recommended speaker layouts and how will the receiver implement it.

For all of the early adopters who purchased a Dolby Atmos system in the last weeks, with receivers costing sometime more than two grands, I sure hope there will be some firmware update solution possible, but nothing is less sure.

3. 2015 receiver models announced with HDMI 2.0 full bandwidth and HDCP 2.2 support

It’s impressive how this generation of home theater technology is annoying for early adopters. Expensive 4K TVs not supporting the full HDMI 2.0 specifications, limited number of devices accepting HDCP 2.2 content and other hiccups makes it hard to commit on an investment at this point without regretting later.

To give you an example, it is currently impossible to use a single chip solution to support both HDCP 2.2 and HDMI 2.0 at 18 Gbps (full bandwidth) which forces both TV and receivers to choose between one of the two. Let’s hope this will be resolved with all new devices launching this year.

I also thought asking for some level of in game Dolby Atmos support from Sony and Microsoft on the next generation console,  but I’m not confident it will happen.

I also hope 8K won’t be that much of a deal already. Rumour has it that Samsung and Sony will show displays using that resolution, but I think the industry needs to establish some standards before moving again with a new resolution.

Let me know if you have different wishes, I’m curious to hear your thoughts.