A few years ago, 3D was hailed as the next big thing in television, the logical successor to high definition. But viewers did not buy the hype, and now the eye-popping format is seen as an expensive flop.
That impression was cemented recently when ESPN, the US’ largest sports network and an early adopter of 3D technology, said it was turning off its three-year-old 3D channel. A spokeswoman said the decision was “due to limited consumer adoption of 3D services”.
The news spurred debate about whether anyone would be left watching in 3D soon, or whether anything would be available worth watching.
The only other big 3D channel, called 3net, a joint venture of Discovery Communications, Sony and Imax, said it was undeterred by ESPN’s decision.
The format is healthier at the box office, but even there, only 36 films were released in 3D last year, down 20 per cent from the peak in 2011, according to the Motion Picture Association of America. Overall, 3D box office revenue was flat.
When television manufacturers started to aggressively market the technology in 2010 — helped by the theatrical release of Avatar in December 2009 and fantastical ideas about how it would feel to be immersed in a sporting event or an action movie — sceptics predicted little consumer demand for 3D television. They turned out to be right. Television owners generally rejected the glasses that were usually required to see in 3D and found that the format was not as immersive as promised.
Carolina Milanesi, a research vice president for Gartner, a technology research company, says the 3D format suffered from “a chicken-and-egg situation where content wasn’t created because of low penetration of 3D TVs in the home, and consumers were not buying 3D TVs due to the lack of compelling content”.
Meanwhile, the television manufacturers that had been pushing 3D are now promoting a newer format, ultra HD or 4K, which promises four times the resolution of the high-definition sets that most people own. Never mind that in many cases the additional detail is not perceptible by the human eye.
— New York Times News Service
