3D or Not 3D: That Is the Question!

For at least the past fifty years, people have been debating the usefulness of three-dimensional effects in the movies – and whether this represents the future of the medium or an occasionally annoying novelty. The recent versions have been much more impressive than the old-fashioned red and green 3D glasses, with images that really do appear to be extending off of the screen and into your personal space, but even the best of them still have issues, such as making the picture noticeably darker and murkier. The new “glasses-free” technology is promising, but they still don’t have the bugs out of it, and even if they did, there are very few movies (and even fewer television programs) which were shot in the right format to make any use of it – which makes the fact that several companies have been trying to market television sets with the glasses-free 3D feature all that much harder to explain…

A story which ran this week on the New York Post website explained how the relative failure of these 3D television products is contributing to the failure of the ESPN 3D service, and may ultimately lead to the disbanding of the channel. It turns out that most of the companies who have been paying for ad time on the new network have been ones that manufacture the 3D television sets – which makes very little sense, since anyone watching ESPN 3D would already have a 3D television set, and anyone who doesn’t have such a television set wouldn’t be watching the new ESPN in the first place. Moreover, since the 3D televisions aren’t selling all that well, the companies that make them can’t afford to keep buying up prime time advertising on ESPN 3D, and may pull their funding – which would leave the network with no revenue to keep it going…

Exactly why anybody thought that either the television sets or the channel that catered to them were worth spending money on in the first place remains unclear. The new 3D movie technology has brought in a lot of money (since theaters charge more to see the 3D versions of movies), but unless a lot of broadcasters and cable companies started investing in 3D cameras, the cable and pay-per-view versions of those same 3D movies would be the only things you could watch on such a device – and those few movies would still be “edited” by most channels, making them an inferior copy anyway. But even if we can somehow account for why the management teams of these companies felt that home-use 3D systems were a good idea, that still doesn’t explain why they didn’t realize that the consumer market wasn’t ready for such products. Even the most basic focus-group research should have revealed that most people have no use for a very expensive piece of home entertainment electronics that they can’t –as of yet – use for more than a single cable channel and a few specific movies…

The ironic part of all of this is that eventually 3D cameras probably will become standard – or, at least, no more expensive than any other video systems – and increasing numbers of television productions will start using them. If the price of the 3D-capable television sets drops in the meanwhile (or if similar products are introduced at a lower price later on) this technology might be a real winner. The question right now is when that will happen – and if it was worth getting in on the new technology wave right from the beginning. Personally, I can wait…