A hot topic covered by many in attendance at the Satellite 2012 Convention in Washington D.C., is the future of 3D. Despite the success of A Very Harold and Kumar’s 3D Christmas, 3D entertainment has not progressed in the entertainment industry at an appropriate rate.
Andrew Wallace, CEO of EutelSat declares, “We haven’t seen very much growth in 3D… [Although 3D]… has had an exciting start, it’s slowed down a bit—it’s much, much slower than high definition.” (EutelSat, a European satellite company, announced at the convention earlier this week of its partnership with a Qatar satellite company to launch into orbit, 25.5 East next year).
To say that the interest in 3D has slowed down a bit is grossly understated if you consider that the first 3D movie made its debut back in 1922. But Wallace is sticking to recent events and is referencing last year’s proportion of subscribers of a U.K. television service that opted for 3D, only 70,000 out of 10 million.
Wallace was included in a panel that congregated at the Satellite Convention in order to discuss this cause. Gary Arlen of ArlenCommunications and Jay Vanderbree of LG Electronics were among the few included in the panel. The panel predicted that despite the recent lack of interest, stereoscopic television is bound to see a future revival after the completion of the development of 3DTV without glasses. Also, a factor that contributed to the lack of interest in 3D — that it consumes so much bandwidth — will soon be relinquished because the development of technology that compresses bandwidth consumption is already underway. In addition, 3D will serve other purposes in the future aside from entertainment value, such as telemedicine and digitally-projected signs.
DirecTV is among the satellite companies that hope the future of 3D is a bright one. DirectTV and other satellite service providers are already implementing new strategies for this very cause. The transition from Ku-band to Ka-band, for example, is one way that networks believe will endow them with a technological edge with 3D services over other networks.
Edited by Rich Steeves