CE Makers Flooding Market With TVs Bearing 2D/3D Conversion Chips
LOS ANGELES -- As CE manufacturers flood the market with TVs with 2D/3D conversion chips, ESPN continues to deliver 3D programming despite a top executive strongly hinting a year ago that such action might “soften” the network’s support for the technology (CED March 10/10 p1).
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Bryan Burns, ESPN vice president of strategic business planning and development, said at a Society for Information Display (SID) conference here that he hasn’t changed his position that conversion chips can cheapen the 3D experience. The chips also risk confusing consumers about what’s true 3D content, he said. “You have to produce a game in different ways because 3D is a totally different production environment so that when convert those events to 2D with a chip, I'm not sure we end up with what we want for ESPN,” Burns said. “My view of that hasn’t wavered over the year and it’s very simple. When you walk into a store and the card says ’this set will do 2D/3D conversion,’ you are telling the customer you don’t have to call your service provider because the set will do conversion for you. If you don’t make that call, that, over the course of time, won’t be good for the business we're in."
Burns conceded that CE suppliers planned well in advance of his remarks last year to introduce sets with 2D/3D conversion chips. Once top TV market share leaders began pushing the technology, a competitive response followed, resulting in the conversion chips being broadly deployed, Mike Abary, senior vice president of Sony’s Home Division, told us. But “there is a need for consumers to be made aware of what they are watching whether it’s a 2D/3D conversion or true 3D,” he said. The CE industry has “much more room to go improve consumer education and the experience at retail in terms of what the facts are about 3D and what the perceived notions are,” Abary said. “It’s the perceptions that have led to false assumptions that we need to kill."
But, in a departure from 2010 marketing strategies, CE companies have placed more emphasis this year on making a TV Internet-enabled, less on making it 3D-capable, executives said. “What we see in terms of incremental increases in purchases are more Internet-connected TVs rather than 3D,” Abary said. “What people are looking at with 3D first and foremost is ‘is it a good HDTV?’ and if it happens to have 3D, all the better. I'm not sure 3D is driving people coming to the store to buy that exclusively."
To drive 3D adoption, some CE manufacturers have supported LG Display’s film patterned retarder (FPR) technology that promises cheaper 3D eyewear, but limits resolution to each eye to 540p, though LG retorts that consumers in focus groups couldn’t tell half resolution from full HD. FPR-based sets can be paired with passive polarized glasses and LG is applying the technology to 26-, 32-, 37-, 42-, 47-, and 55-inch LCDs and is halting production of active-shutter 3D LCDs. The initial success of FPR-based sets at retail from LG, Toshiba, Vizio and others have given their rivals pause. While Sony hasn’t disclosed plans for FPR, it has noticed the technology has helped boost LG’s 3D TV sales, Abary said. In LG’s spatial multiplexing approach, an FPR corresponds to an LCD’s odd and even lines and converts left or right circular polarization that, seen through polarized glasses as left and right images, produces 3D.
"LG is starting to do well in the United States in regards to its FPR technology so you are starting to see a little bit more adoption and that’s an acknowledgment that the technology makes a difference,” Abary told us. “We're looking at the market and LG wasn’t really playing in the 3D space last year and them coming up that quickly” in market share is a surprise to Sony, he said.
While glasses-free autostereoscopic 3D TVs have been demonstrated, commercialization and mass market adoption of those sets are years off and likely will coincide with the arrival of sets capable of handling 4,000x2,000 (4Kx2K) resolution programming, executives said. The deployment of 4Kx2K-capable TVs will hinge on more bandwidth being available to deliver content, much of which hasn’t been developed yet. While 4Kx2K front projectors are deployed in movie theaters, prices must decline for the technology to find a home in consumer TVs, executives said. “In order for 4Kx2K to be adopted in the consumer market, the broadband pipes have to get fatter in order to accommodate the additional data and there has to be content,” Abary said. “We're already there on the theater side.”
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Sony will ship second-generation Google TV products, but the timing hasn’t been set, Abary said. Google TV debuted last fall in Sony LCD TVs and a Blu-ray player and a Logitech set-top box, but Google slowed plans and reorganized the division responsible for the platform as it improved the software. At its annual I/O conference last week, Google said it was creating a 2.0 version of Google TV software based on the Android 3.1 operating system that’s an upgrade of the Honeycomb version for tablets. Developers building applications for Google TV will get access for the first time to Android Market, the company’s online applications store. Google also will release a Google TV emulator for the PC. Samsung, Toshiba and Vizio have Google TV products under development, industry officials have said. “We are not seeing any slowdown from them,” said Abary, who attended the I/O conference. The new Google TVs will be better capable of receiving software updates and become “more of a PC where you receive constant downloads and new versions” of the operating system, he said. Any new Google TV products Sony introduces will have a “feature and technology ability that you can’t improve just through software and we're going to make something new,” Abary said.
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Namco Bandai will release a 3D PC game in late 2012 based on the upcoming Tekken: Blood Vengeance 3D movie, said Carlson Choi, vice president of marketing. The movie will be released in November, he said. The film, which Namco is developing internally, will be distributed by Anchor Bay Entertainment and also will be available on Blu-ray. It will be Namco’s first offering since releasing a 3D patch last fall for its Enslaved title for PlayStation 3. The 3D patch had a low attach rate with only about two percent of the game’s owners downloading an update, Carlson said. Typically about 10 percent of a game’s owners get an update, he said. The patch took three months to develop and was a free download, he said. In contrast, the full 3D version of Tekken: Blood Vengeance will have taken 18 months to develop, Carlson said. “Is the market we serve today ready?” Choi asked. “The answer is not right now, but it will be in the future."
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BitAnimate has developed 2D/3D conversion software it claims bests that supplied by JVC and DDD. The algorithms, created by President Behrooz Maleki, can be implemented on PC graphics cards or in TV video processor cores, company officials said. In addition to licensing deals, BitAnimate is developing a new website that could potentially provide a 3D conversion service. BitAnimate uses its own 3D player, potentially enabling users to choose that output format to match the 3D platform they will view content on. The software could be quickly implemented by movie studios, but could take nine to 12 months for a CE company to build it into products, CEO Bruce Berkoff said. The software analyzes a scene for content, creates a depth map using visual or motion cues and builds a 3D image. Among its potential competitors, DDD has the largest share due mainly to its supply agreement with Samsung. As it develops software, BitAnimate is seeking funding, Berkoff said. “If I was helping this company in 2006, we'd have $10 million by now,” Berkoff said. “We have had incredible interest from the big guys and just that would have been enough back then. This technology could easily die because there is not enough funding.”