IBC

World Screen Weekly, September 18, 2008

3D TV All the Rage

Every trade event has its theme, and the overriding buzz at this year’s IBC, which concluded in Amsterdam on Tuesday, September 16, was 3-D stereoscopic display.

Just as in the world of film 3-D is considered by many as the next big technology that will attract audiences to theaters, a growing number of TV executives believe the stereoscopic image will revive the appeal of the small screen, beset by competition from the even smaller screens of the Internet, PDAs and mobile phones.

All agree, however, that two other technical hurdles must be crossed before 3-D TV can become a reality: digitalization and high definition. The first—already under way in several countries—will provide the bandwidth to carry stereoscopic images. The second will ensure an image quality high enough to justify 3-D viewing.

A multiplicity of IBC panels, exhibits, product demos and events focused on 3-D technology. And the judges of the IBC Innovation Awards awarded this year’s top prize to the film Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert, which broke box-office records when it was released solely in 3-D earlier this year.

This 3-D HD mini-craze climaxed at a live hookup with DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, who received this year’s IBC International Honour for Excellence award. In the live interview the executive declared that “2-D films are going to be a thing of the past.”

Katzenberg was seen in Amsterdam via the first-ever transatlantic telecast in stereoscopic high definition. Viewers wore special 3-D glasses to watch a live interview with the executive, a longtime proponent of 3-D content creation and display.

Just like sound and color before it, 3-D is the next revolution in film technology, said Katzenberg. "When sound was introduced silent movies went away. Not some, all," he added. "Likewise, when Technicolor was introduced, within five years [practically] all movies were being made in color. I believe [that] in a reasonable period of time, more than a handful but less than two handfuls [of] movies are going to be made in 3-D."

DreamWorks is putting its money where its mouth is. Katzenberg predicted that when Monsters vs. Aliens is released next spring, 30 percent of the film’s U.S. audience will see the 3-D version, and that by the time Shrek 4 comes out in 2010, the number will rise to 80 percent.

But will this growing penetration of 3-D in the film arena also occur in television? Most definitely, according to Steve Schklair, the CEO of 3ality Digital Systems, a developer of 3-D display systems, which announced a partnership with high-end equipment maker Quantel to market a jointly developed image processor that speeds and facilitates the creation of stereoscopic images for film and TV.

“I foresee a three-to-five year scenario for the introduction of 3-D HD to the home,” he told World Screen. The drivers of the market, said Schklair, will be the growing number of telecasts of 3-D versions of theatrical films, which are becoming more abundant, and an increase in the release of stereoscopic versions of films on Blu-ray DVD.

Schklair notes that about 1.5 million consumers in the U.S. today actually possess 3-D HDTV sets without even knowing it. Many of the HD sets now sold as 2-D display devices will show 3-D images when fed from a 3-D source. All the owner needs to add is a pair of 3-D glasses.

In another noteworthy development at IBC, a resurgent Russia, powered by revenues from its petroleum exports, opened the Russian House exposition, which showcased all aspects of Russia’s television industry, including channels like Channel One Russia, news organizations like ERA, technology groups like HD Union and a slew of technology companies.

Russian TV executives also held a press conference at IBC (conducted in Russian, with simultaneous interpretation provided in English) to update world media on the status of the digital transition in the vast Eurasian country, which, they said, is on schedule to digitize its entire TV infrastructure by 2015.

“We’re interested in becoming better known by our Western colleagues,” said Mikhail Seslavinski, the head of Russia’s Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communications. “We want to digitize and we want to develop joint ventures in this area before 2015.”

Seslavinski and his colleagues stressed that in order for this digital conversion to proceed—and to be extended to 100 percent of the nation’s population—Russia needs to rely on new satellite and set-top box technology. The goal is to for every Russian citizen to be able to receive no less than 20 television channels plus a variety of multimedia services by 2015.

As in the U.S. and other countries, the Russian government is ready to subsidize the installation of digital receiving equipment in millions of household, said Gerassim Gadiyan, the president of Russia’s HD Union, especially in remote areas and among “the underprivileged segments of society.”

As at previous IBCs, mobile technology continued to grab attention as an alternative means to distribute video content.

Mobile industry group FLO Forum hosted a roundtable at the show to discuss the future of the business. Flo Forum, which counts 85 mobile industry members, promotes the global use of FLO (Forward Link Only) technology to provide content to mobile devices. The technology—branded as MediaFLO in the U.S. by Qualcomm—is used by Verizon Wireless and AT&T to broadcast content nationally. The carriers license material from content companies like CBS, FOX, NBC, ESPN, CNN, Nickelodeon and MTV, which they make available to consumers for a subscription fee.

—By Peter Caranicas