Some of television’s biggest players – from ESPN to an alliance of IMAX, Discovery and Sony – announced Tuesday a leap big enough to turn a blue “Avatar” green with envy.
They will be broadcasting in 3-D soon, as in June for ESPN.
But here’s something to really make your eyes pop: That 60-inch HDTV plasma screen you just bought? It probably won’t cut it.
“You’re going to have to move it to your bedroom,” said David Wertheimer, the executive director of the University of Southern California’s Entertainment Technology Center.
Odds are you’re going to need a new set. Price tag: $1,000 or more.
As for those zippy computerized “active shutter” 3-D shades?
Chalk up perhaps another $200, plus more for a new 3-D Blu-ray or DVD player.
Right now, TV experts said, television manufacturers have yet to agree upon a single standard that will allow one pair of glasses to be used with sets produced by different manufacturers.
“If my friend has a Panasonic 3-D TV and I have a Sony 3-D TV, you will not be able to use your glasses on my set,” said Bryan Del Rizzo, senior spokesman for Nvidia Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif., the maker of 3-D microprocessors that help turn 2-D video games and other computer technologies into 3-D.
But let’s be perfectly clear about one thing: 3-D is on the rise, experts said. If the announcements on Tuesday, timed to coincide with the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, highlight anything, it is that 3-D television will no longer be seen as a gimmick but as a major movement in viewing evolution.
Discovery Communications, which runs the Discovery Channel, TLC and other cable channels, will distribute its 3-D channel for Discovery/Imax/Sony consortium in 2011.
“We’ve done a lot of consumer research,” USC’s Wertheimer said. “It seems to be that this is the real deal.”
An online poll of more than 3,000 individuals conducted in December by the USC group revealed, among other findings, 3-D’s growing popularity: 43 percent of adults who have seen a 3-D movie within the last year would prefer to watch movies and televisions shows in 3-D instead of 2-D. 53 percent report wanting to watch 3-D television shows at home; 33 percent report wanting to watch all television programs in 3-D. 25 percent plan to buy a 3-D TV within the next three years.
Of those, 48 percent describe themselves as above-average sports fans, good news to ESPN, which said it plans to start “ESPN 3D” in June, when Mexico and South Africa face off in soccer’s World Cup.
“We always consider ourselves to be on the bleeding edge of technology,” said ESPN spokeswoman Amy Phillips. “With 3-D, we’re giving sports fans a new way to experience the game.”
Within 12 months of the World Cup kickoff, ESPN plans to cover 84 events in 3-D – including the college football and basketball championships, another two dozen soccer games and the network’s own Summer X Games.
Despite the need to replace your set and wear special glasses, network executives believe sports fans will join in.
The 3-D games will be broadcast on a special ESPN channel that will go black except for the special events. Negotiations are ongoing over how those channels might be included in existing cable and satellite TV packages.
Although the games will show up on the network’s existing channels, the 3-D versions will have their own announcing teams that adjust their calls to acknowledge the three-dimensional images.
The network has been experimenting with the technology for more than two years. In September, it had live 3-D broadcasts of an Ohio State-Southern California football game that Phillips said had people in theaters in California and Connecticut flinching when the action moved toward the camera.
Those 3-D broadcasts deployed camera’s at lower angles, closer to the action and departing from the traditional high-in-the-stands perspective.
Phillips said ESPN thought high-definition television took off when ESPN started broadcasting games for the then-upscale sets and expected the sports network would blaze the same trail for 3-D.
“When ESPN entered the HD market, it was considered a tipping point for the HD experience and for HD sets,” she said. “We see us being a catalyst for 3-D in the same way.”
Like any new technology, particularly a pricey one, some analysts are greeting 3-D television skeptically. Frank Beacham, who writes a column for the trade journal “TV Technology,” doesn’t think the experience will wow viewers enough to win them over or prompt them to rush out to buy new 3-D-ready TVs.
Rather, at best the hope is that people in the market for a new television might pay a premium for TVs with the technology.
“It’s not so easy to get a family to spend $200 on glasses for each person and have to change the whole home entertainment system,” Beacham said. “And I’ve seen demonstrations of the technology, and I’m not impressed.”
The success of “Avatar” and its awe-inspiring use of 3-D is good publicity for the 3-D television, he said. But Beacham warned that TV viewers would see something much different than the world populated by oversized blue creatures and their ethereal planet.
“That was a movie that took seven years to make,” he said. “When you shoot in a football stadium on the fly, it’s going to be erratic. It’s not always going to work. People will be disappointed. … A movie that is mixed quite carefully can be very compelling. Something you do live from Madison Square Garden is completely different.”
Yet sports fans have proven they’ll pay extra to experience events more dramatically, said Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University.
The question, he said, is whether the timing is right. “So many people have just bought a new (flat-screen or high-definition) set, so it’s hard to imagine them going out in this economy and replacing those things. Five or six years, this may still be slugging along.”
Nvidia’s Del Rizzo sees the world differently.
“Could you imagine two years ago that we would all be running around our living rooms with plastic guitars?” he said, referring to the phenomenal success of video games such as “Rock Band” and “Guitar Hero.”