Picture this: you’re sitting on the couch at home watching TV and dreaming about your next holiday when out comes a 3D image of a woman being massaged in the Maldives from the TV screen.
The television set is intuitive. It knew you were considering a trip overseas. It even has an approximate itinerary of what you planned to do when you get there and what your basic budget level would be.
The year?
2050?
Actually it’s more like 2011 and could be a standard feature in most households by as early as 2015.
3D TV's will be coming to you in more ways than one
The aforementioned scenario is an advanced picture of what 3D TV will deliver once it has been engineered to intelligently interact with the internet. Once this is achieved, there’s nothing stopping it from providing clever advertising messages and prompts based on the internet activity of its household members. Searched for a used car online recently? Expect to see an unusually high number of commercials for low budget cars that are directly targeting you. Frequently visit a spoofing news site? Anticipate getting a lot of comedy movie trailer pop-ups and other interactive promotions. You get the idea.
Before we get here, a couple of key players need to come to the party. Although production companies have already arrived, television manufacturers and broadcasters are set to be next, with game developers quickly following suit. On the manufacturing side, Samsung, Sony, Panasonic, Mitsubishi and LG have all confirmed that they have 3D production in the pipeline, with Sony expected to be the first to put TV’s into mass production this year. As with most 3D formats, Sony’s television sets will come with compatible glasses; the difference being that these ones use active shutter technology or a flickering method as opposed to the classic red and blue polarising method we have known until now. Without officially putting a price on these sets analysts have predicted that the first models will come with a ten to fifteen thousand dollar price tag. As we probably all expected, it’s a bit pricey – unless you regularly dine on caviar or worry more about your home entertainment system than your lack of friends, receding hairline and overdrawn credit card put together. But enough about me.
On the broadcasting side, Foxtel is leading the 3D charge in Australia. Having already carried out significant in-house testing of set-top boxes that are capable of receiving 3D broadcasts they look on track to provide an overview of product details by this time next year. While there’s a strong possibility that they might be able to sign up 3D subscribers by mid 2011, a number of questions remain over the affordability and compatibility (ie – will people need new 3D screens or will regular TV screens be able to reconvert the signal?). No doubt that until this is finalised they’ll be a team of boffins working on this, trying to convince potential customers that there’s more to Foxtel than a programming ethos of quantity over quality and a music channel that offers five different songs played on a continuous cycle. Like many, I don’t think there is but credit to them if they can change this common perception.
Was the success of Avatar just sporadic behavior in the 3D cycle? Well, according to the head of Dreamworks: Jeffrey Katzenberg, 3D films represented 10 of the 170 major films released in 2009. At the same time, they also represented 4 of the top 10 revenue earners over the same period. Sure, this figure is biased towards animation and action adventure films as well as movies backed by premium levels of investment, but the recent earnings of Avatar and the ability for it to nullify the effects of piracy in the short term mean that 3D is only going to get bigger, very quickly from here.