If you were to take a walk around the show floor at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, you'd probably think that big flat panels and wireless distribution of audio and video are the big stories of this year's show (also, wireless in general). But behind the scenes, DisplayLink is showing off what could be the most killer technology of all because of how practical it is: a multidisplay system for PCs and Macs that works off of USB. In other words, the video from your PC can be distributed across as many as six displays with little more than one USB cable from your system. Shown also: the target displays, some of which have DisplayLink's firmware built-in, also can use the USB cable as their power source.

According to the company's CEO and president Hamid Farzaneh, DisplayLink won't be making its technology available directly to end users. Rather, the technology involves a chipset that the company is licensing to companies like LG and Toshiba that make displays and computers (respectively speaking).

A typical implementation, for example, could involve a string of LG flat panel displays, each of which has DisplayLink's technology in them and each of which has a built-in USB hub. The result? You connect your PC to the first DisplayLink-enabled display with a USB cable and then you daisy chain the other displays together via their own USB connectivity. From there, as many as six displays can mirror the same image that's on the host PC or, the displays can be strung together to form a much larger aggregate display the way some people often do today with the dual-display modes of their PCs.

Another example of implementation is where the docking station to a notebook PC (like the ones from Toshiba) has an input for receiving the video over USB and then can distribute that video to multiple displays from its own USB ports (since many docking stations act as USB hubs, too).

According to Farzaneh, not only will the technology work over wireless USB (see our video on that from CES), it will pretty much work over any medium.

Of all the technologies I've seen at CES 2008 so far, this is the one that, given how incredibly practical it is, I said to myself, "Self, I want it and I want it now." But what may really make it the killer technology of CES 2008 is how the company is in discussions with a bunch of well-known OEMs already. So far, Samsung and LG are building the company's technology into its displays and DisplayLink is having conversations with most of the other well-known display makers. The same goes for system manufacturers.

Given the potential for DisplayLink to become a de facto standard and how Farzeneh's company could end up in an incredibly powerful and lucrative position as a result, the company is considering opening a portion of its stack for royalty-free use so that other companies can innovate on top of it. Farzaneh talks about this in the video.