ATLANTA – Despite the helpful global boost supplied by the World Cup, 3DTV will need a lot more quality content to drive consumer interest in the technology, according to a panel of 3DTV experts.
Speaking at a recent Light Reading conference in Atlanta, the experts said a few early technology adopters may put up with a limited pool of 3D programming initially. But, they warned, 3DTV won’t attract mainstream viewers until there’s a large menu of high-quality 3D shows and movies available.
Faced with that content gap, some TV set manufacturers are now building in chips that can convert existing 2D content to 3D. Some experts warned, however, that this step could backfire because of the relatively primitive state of conversion technology.
"The quality is nowhere as good as native 3D content, [although] it does give the consumer something to watch," said Paul Gagnon, director of North American TV Research for DisplaySearch. “But that [strategy] could poison the well… if the quality is bad."
Based on some early work with stereoscopic 3DTV, cable operators and programmers have already learned that they can’t skimp on bits. A prime example was cable’s live, on-demand 3D coverage of the 2010 Masters’ golf tournament in April.
For typical HD-VOD content delivered over MPEG-2, cable has relied on a "safe harbor" threshold of about 15 Mbps. But tests showed picture quality suffered when 3D content was encoded at 15 Mbps for VOD, said John Vartanian, chief technology officer of In Demand LLC, which teamed up with Comcast on the Masters’ 3D project. So the partners agreed to encode the content at 18.75 Mbps instead, producing “a visible improvement,” he said.
Vartanian said any future 3D-VOD standard will spell out a higher encoding rate than the standard for traditional HDTV. "It’ll be 1.x the standard, but we don’t know what the ‘x’ is," he said, citing estimates that it will probably range between 10% and 50%.
While the Masters project proved that 3D-VOD will need richer encoding, the experts said there’s no rule of thumb yet for "frame compatible" 3D content. This format, which combines two half-resolution HD signals, is what’s now used for legacy digital cable set-tops.
Despite such technical concerns, several programmers and content aggregators are already betting on 3DTV, including such major players as ESPN and DirecTV. For example, aggregator Avail-TVN plans to launch two linear 3D channels and some 3D VOD offerings by the fall.
Michael Kazmier, CTO of Avail-TVN, agreed that premium bandwidth will be necessary to maintain high quality levels for half-resolution stereoscopic 3D. "The boat anchor is the legacy set-top,’ he said. “Some artifacts can show up in the conversion, so you have to throw more bits at it."
Buddy Snow, senior director of solutions marketing for Motorola’s Broad Home Solutions division, admitted that anything beyond half-resolution 3DTV will require pricey new digital set-tops. "But the visual results are outstanding," he said, noting that cable should enjoy a bandwidth advantage over its satellite TV rivals.
Snow warned that reluctant operators can’t afford to dither on 3DTV for too long. "Even if you don’t do it, your competition will," he stressed.
Gagnon projected that CE manufacturers will ship about 2.5 million 3DTVs worldwide this year, a small sliver of the overall TV market of nearly 226 million sets. Based on sales bumps expected for the second half, though, he may raise forecast to 3 million to 3.5 million sets. Gagnon said North America "will really be the launch region for 3DTVs" with two-thirds of 3D shipments this year, followed by Japan (14%) and Western Europe (13%).
Alan Breznick is a Toronto-based senior analyst at Heavy Reading, part of the Light Reading Communications Network and a Cartt.ca contributor.
