With an expensive new TV set and a $150 pair of funny glasses, you can watch 3-D movies and some sports from your sofa. Next up: nature shows, reality TV, and even game shows. Why the evening news likely will stay in two dimensions.
The venerable game show "Wheel of Fortune," a ratings smash in syndication since 1983, isn't exactly "Avatar" when it comes to visual complexity. Vanna White points to letters. Contestants buy vowels.
Nevertheless, show producer Harry Friedman says he wants to do it in 3-D.
At a recent run-through, host Pat Sajak protruded from the screen like a friendly gargoyle. A camera that whizzed past the "grand prize getaway" to San Francisco made the wooden Victorian townhouses look like pieces of a pop-up book. "Down the road we'll shoot all of our on-location footage of prize packages in 3-D," said Mr. Friedman.
Taking a cue from movie studios that have goosed their box-office take with 3-D films like "Toy Story 3" and "Alice in Wonderland," the television industry is betting TV viewers will splurge to watch more-lifelike versions of their favorite athletes, wild animals and, potentially, sitcom characters.
This month, ESPN launched a 3-D channel designed to broadcast sporting events including 25 World Cup soccer matches. ESPN will offer close to 100 sporting events in the coming year. Turner Sports and Nascar will make the Coke Zero 400 available in 3-D on July 3. Fox Sports and DirecTV will provide the Major League Baseball All-Star game next month.
"We may be seeing BYOG [bring your own glasses] at the bottom of Super Bowl party invites," said Chuck Pagano, ESPN's executive vice president of technology.
This month, DirecTV and Panasonic will launch several joint 3-D channels devoted to movies, concerts and sports. Next year, Discovery, Sony and Imax will introduce a 24-hour 3-D venture focused on movies, nature programs, and other shows. The network may also air popular documentary series like "Man vs. Wild" or "The Haunted," about paranormal activity, and will have access to Imax movies like "Hubble."
All of this could usher in something as transformative as the VCR—or a technological footnote like the eight-track tape.
TV doesn't have the captive audience of a two-hour movie, or its dependence on slam-bang visual techniques. Viewers often watch a favorite show as they open the mail, balance a checkbook or eat dinner. Wearing bulky, $150 3-D glasses and sitting in the "sweet spot" on the sofa directly in front of the center of the screen could hinder the casual home-viewing experience.
The current menu of offerings is far more plentiful than what was available in high-definition in the early days of HDTV, partly because TV manufacturers have focused on teaming up with networks and cable providers to invest in 3-D channels.
"We learned from the launch of HDTV when there wasn't enough to watch," says Peter Fannon, vice president of technology and government affairs at Panasonic. "We think that 3-D could catch on a lot faster."
The first key to success is if the hardware gets cheap enough. The special sets look like sleek, top-of-the-line flat-screens and work with active-shutter glasses that interpret an infrared signal that rapidly opens and closes each lens, creating a three-dimensional effect, a big stretch from the cardboard frames with red-and-blue lenses. The sets also display traditional, high-definition images.
At about $2,000, they are so far too expensive for anyone but the early adopters who buy every new gizmo. This month, Best Buy Co. will expand its 3-D offerings with displays and sets available in every store nationwide, compared with just a scattering of stores in major markets. The company sold out of its first shipment of 11,000 Panasonic 3-D TVs the first month it started carrying them.
Sony has dispatched its high-profile pitchmen Peyton Manning and Justin Timberlake to hawk its new sets. Samsung's 3-D LED commercial in which players take a soccer ball out of a mural and eventually kick it into a TV set have been ubiquitous during the World Cup.
Less than 2% of the 114 million households in the U.S. will have a 3-D TV in 2010; the number is expected to more than double next year, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. Of the estimated 38 million new TV sets U.S. consumers will buy in 2010, 1.05 million of those will be 3-D. By 2017, 27 million sets a year are expected to sell, according to market researcher iSuppli Corp.
They won't sell, though, if producers don't create TV shows that show off the technology, the way that science-fiction and animation do with 3-D movies, and other genres thus far do not.
"3-D doesn't add much to the evening news or two people sipping wine in a French film," says Richard Gelfond, chief executive at Imax.
So far, some companies feel they have more to gain than others. Sports and nature-show purveyors are exploring the technology, along with cable operators who see the potential for added fees from subscribers, including pay-per-view movies and special events.
Traditional broadcast networks, makers of sitcoms, police dramas and reality shows, are more reticent. Shooting in 3-D would roughly double production costs at a time when networks face a downturn in advertising revenue. Plus, many shows recently invested millions to convert to HD.
"I'm not sure [3-D] is going to be economically viable for the near future," CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves recently said at an industry conference.
"Just because we can do it doesn't mean the audience wants it," says Alan Wurtzel, president of research at NBC Universal. He compares 3-D to previous technological flops like TV sets in cars and built into stoves so cooking housewives can watch while cooking.
Right now, viewers who have the sets have just a modest number of options. Sports are expected to be a big driver, but exactly which sports will work is still up in the air. The Masters golf tournament in April aired in 3-D, and the lush, colorful setting and stately pace worked well. Greens that look flat on regular TV suddenly displayed their steep undulations. Cable provider Comcast Corp. distributed the broadcast, which was also made available to Time Warner, Cox and Cablevision subscribers.
Producers are learning that some sports work better than others. Close-ups work better than long shots. Sports stadiums weren't built with 3-D in mind, so ESPN producers may have to buy seats and potentially create obstructed views for fans to get ground-level shots during football and baseball games. The standard overhead view of a football field could distort, just like a long shot on the Africa savannah. "You just have to unlearn the past 50 years of TV," said ESPN's Mr. Pagano.
Nature shows, similarly, lend themselves to certain conditions. Underwater sequences work well because movement is fairly slow and close-ups abound. Cheetahs chasing gazelles across the Serengeti can be more problematic: shots from a long lens tend to flatten out, and high speeds can get blurry. Tracking shy animals with a bulky 3-D camera isn't ideal.
Discovery says it's not ready to go 3-D with its popular show "Deadliest Catch," about extreme fishermen. Fast movements can be dizzying in 3-D and turbulent waters cause the crew to lose around a dozen cameras each season. That's a non-starter with expensive 3-D equipment.
As with videotape, the pornography industry is diving right in: movies in production include an adult-entertainment "Avatar" parody produced by Hustler, says Mark Kernes, a senior editor at the trade publication Adult Video News.
Discovery programmers are testing popular series like TLC's "Cake Boss," a reality show about a jovial New Jersey baker and Animal Planet's "River Monsters" in 3-D. No final decisions have been made.
Producers are mindful that if consumers' first taste of 3-D seems cheesy, especially after buying a pricey 3-D set, the technology could turn off audiences.
"It's not going to be the 1950s with a hand coming out of your TV," says Tom Cosgrove, the recently named chief executive of the Discovery-Sony-Imax venture. "We want to do it when it makes the show richer and gets the viewer closer to the experience."
Last year, when NBC wanted to give its prime-time action comedy "Chuck" a ratings boost the night after its Super Bowl broadcast, it aired an episode in 3-D, piggybacking on the 125 million 3-D glasses that had already been given out for free as part of a promotion for the animated movie "Monsters vs. Aliens." The experiment got the show's highest rating of the season, especially with young people.
It's too early to say if the living room is an accommodating 3-D zone. In addition to the potential annoyance of wearing glasses at home, they cost about $150 a pair and only work on a single brand of TV, much as different controllers only work with a single video game platform. Manufacturers say their consumer research shows viewers don't mind wearing the glasses. The companies believe that as 3-D TV becomes mainstream, not only will glasses work with every brand, but opticians will offer prescription models and fashion designers will create high-end, branded eyewear. Chanel 3-D glasses, Panasonic's Mr. Fannon says, "would make great stocking stuffers."
What about news broadcasts? A hairdo behind an anchor desk in 3-D might not sound too thrilling, but Buzz Hays, chief instructor at Sony's 3-D Technology Center, says everything can eventually work in 3-D; producers and consumers just have to adapt.
"Yes, there's something bizarre about having a giant talking head in your house," he says. "But putting the viewer in the situation of being there, in news coverage of war zones, for instance—that's really powerful stuff."
Stereoscopic 3-D dates back to 1838 and creates the illusion of depth by presenting two slightly different images to each eye. 3-D TVs involve sending separate left and right eye images to the screen every 1/120th of a second, twice as fast as a regular HDTV.
Networks and consumer electronics manufacturers must make sure current shows don't lead to eye strain, headaches or dizziness, since shoddy productions could hurt sales. Sony recently opened a Hollywood training facility to teach crews to properly shoot with 3-D cameras. Panasonic will hold nationwide training seminars with cameramen later this year. "It's very easy to get it wrong and have an audience that will suffer," says Simon Robinson, chief scientist at The Foundry, a London-based technology firm that produced 3-D software used in "Avatar."
Doug Burton, 37, a technology manager at an insurance company in Chicago, was in the market for a new TV for his family room. He had no intention of buying a 3-D model until he went to his local Best Buy and watched a soccer demo.
"All I could think about was Sunday afternoons," says Mr. Burton, a Minnesota Vikings fan. He ended up spending just over $2,100 for a package that included a 46-inch 3-D TV, two pairs of 3-D glasses and the requisite 3-D Blu-ray player.