Where is 3D leading?

April 19, 2010
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It’s becoming clear that 2010 will be an outstanding year for advances in TV technology as 3D is pushed at consumers from all sides. Over the past week, several announcements have been made heralding what could become a “summer of three dimensions”. Given the investment that is being made in content, hardware and hype, there must be a good number of corporate finance directors who are starting to cross their fingers.

At the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, four US media companies revealed plans for 3DTV services. Discovery, Direct TV, CBS and the sports network ESPN all intend to offer 3D content from this summer. Around 40 different 3DTV models will be available from major CE manufacturers in time for the launch together with the necessary “eyewear”. Almost all will require the use of “active glasses”, which darken left and right lenses sequentially, in time with the left/right sequence of images on the screen.

This news indicates that the industry trend is to go with the “cheap screens, expensive glasses” option, which requires consumers to purchase additional glasses beyond the two pairs that will be supplied with each screen. Companies such as XpandD, which already supplies glasses in the UK for the NFT and the Picturehouse Uckfield among others, already have consumer products in their catalogue.

These after-market vendors are expected to benefit from consumer demand as 3D becomes more popular although at around £100 a pair they will be hardly an impulse buy. Glasses that are “accidentally” brought home from cinema trips will not work, though some will no doubt try, and there are “running costs” for active glasses: each pair requires a new battery every couple of months.

In the UK, BSkyB plans for a 3D television channel really start to gather pace from May onwards. The company already has announced that the current generation of Sky HD boxes will be 3D compatible and all the major CE companies will incorporate the Sky 3D standard in their hardware. Before long, many of the flat screens on sale will be not just HD-ready but 3D-ready too, so it is as well that HD and 3D are compatible.

At the moment, technical standards continue to evolve at several points in the chain, a matter of some concern for producers. Consumers, however, are unlikely to discover that the 3D TV they buy in 2010 is outdated by next year unless holographic display prices fall dramatically.

Sport is expected to benefit from 3D coverage and as the FIFA World Cup 2010 approaches, 3D TV press releases have fluttered into view on all sides. Official sponsor Sony is not surprisingly out in front, since the company will broadcast 25 games live in 3D from South Africa.

England will not feature unless they reach the quarterfinal, and those UK football enthusiasts who want to watch the games in 3D will either have to camp out in Sony dealers or avoid the results until Sony releases a Blu-ray 3D disc of the coverage later in the year.

Tennis fans are not forgotten, at least across the channel, where Orange France announced that they would launch a 3D IPTV service in May, starting with the French Open. No news so far on the release date of the Blu-ray 3D version although with the long release windows in France it could be November before the disc is available.

From the amount of pre-launch publicity generated, it might be thought that we all will be watching in 3D by this time next year. Whatever the rate of uptake for 3D in the home, content owners will need to ramp-up their production rates sharply if the new channels are not to be filled with repeats. The pseudo-3D “Clash of the Titans”, however, has received a slating in the US, so producers might do well to avoid 2D conversions.

“Titans” was shot as a conventional 2D production but the booming demand for 3D led Warner to rush through a conversion using Indian facilities. The result has generated nearly $250 million at the box office but has not pleased the 3D fraternity.

The CEO of Dreamworks Animation, Jeffrey Katzenberg, told Variety, “You cannot do anything that is of a lower grade and a lower quality than what has just been done on ‘Clash of the Titans’”. He claimed that shoddy 3D will cause a backlash that will kill the format and said that the day when moviegoers wake up will be “…the day they walk away from us, and we blew it.”

Sony Executive Deputy President, Hiroshi Yoshioka, echoes his point of view. He said in a keynote speech at the NAB convention, “Poorly executed 3D is harmful and threatens its long-term success.”

One of the secrets of Blu-ray 3D production will be access to 3D-enabled authoring tools and Sony was one of the two major suppliers to announce their offering this week. The latest Blu-print 6 package for Blu-ray 3D title authoring will be available from June onwards together with Z-Depth (that’s “Z” as in “Gee!”) which “… allows 3D authoring companies to easily create required disparity metadata files for positioning of subtitles and IG menus in a 3D Blu-ray Disc production”. Stand by for a bold new dimension in jargon.

Sony’s product, aimed at professional authoring houses and video editors, includes the tools to create 3D interactive and presentation graphics, 3D BD-J integration, and the ability to generate the Blu-ray 3D disc cutting master. It is likely to appeal as an upgrade for those companies already using Blu-print and will open the doors to independents wishing to release Blu-ray 3D titles.

The other announcement came on Thursday from Sonic Solutions, which has dominated the professional authoring market since the launch of DVD. The new package, 3DAccess is intended for the creation of Blu-ray 3D content and 3D distribution over the web. This could be an important step in bringing 3D to the home, since it combines authoring for both packaged media and online delivery in a single suite of production tools.

Sonic Solutions is well placed to exploit new 3D avenues since it is part of a group that includes the Roxio “CinemaNow” brand, which has close links to the Hollywood Studios. Premium filmed entertainment, both download-to-own and Pay Per View, is available online from CinemaNow, often day-and-date with DVD releases. The CinemaNow technology is behind the Blockbuster Online and BestBuy online services in the US and is pre-installed on a variety of devices sold in BestBuy stores from connected TVs to Blu-ray players and smartphones. It is now poised to add 3D to this portfolio.

The wider acceptance of 3D will increase pressure on available bandwidth of all the delivery channels, however, and threatens to widen the gap between the superfast fibre “haves” and the ADSL “have-nots”. The universal commitment to 2Mbps is laughable in the face of the high-performance demands made by 3D programmes. Without a guarantee of at least 6 Mbps, 3DTV over broadband will remain beyond the reach of many UK homes, which could prove a big bonus for Blu-ray 3D sales.

So can those investors and financial directors who have authorised their companies to speculate millions on 3D now start to uncross their fingers and enjoy a few profitable years? After all, so far it has worked wonders for the cinema.

Theatrical origination in 3D is certainly enjoying a boom and this will continue to create short-term enthusiasm for the format. It may also provide a resource that future generations will appreciate, even though it falls a long way short of a true 3D rendition of a scene. But content producers are not philanthropists and unless the revenues start to match the investment, the inevitably higher production costs are going to be counted against income.

When audiences tired of shaky “cardboard cut-out” 3D with red/blue glasses, Hollywood was swift to abandon the format. This time the stakes may be higher but the economics remain the same. For as long as consumers believe that 3D without glasses is just around the corner, media companies might need to keep searching for ways to reach a financially viable audience.