‘Pick Your Poison’

Cable Won’t Try to Compete With Blu-ray on 3D Quality, Comcast Guru Says

April 13, 2010 by Paul Gluckman|Top News

LAS VEGAS -- Most people who viewed 3D telecasts or highlight reels of Masters golf came away so impressed that they think the jump to 3D from HD will “be a bigger transition than it was from SD to HD,” said Dan Holden, chief scientist at the Comcast Media Center in Centennial, Colo. At the NAB Show’s Broadcast Engineering Conference on Saturday, he said Comcast plans to deliver 3D content in an “over-under” format at half the resolution per eye of full HD, which won’t require adding bandwidth. He thinks most other cable companies will do the same, he said.

"Can you watch 2D content on a 3D TV? Absolutely,” Holden said. “And if we were to send a 3D signal into a 3D television, most of the manufacturers are creating a button that will allow you to convert the 3D content back to 2D. But that content will be shown in half-resolution HD.” An audience questioner asked whether cable’s beaming 3D at half-resolution per eye and at bit rates averaging 15 Mbps will put it at a competitive disadvantage to Blu-ray 3D, which requires full HD resolution in both left and right eyes and streams at 60 Mbps, compared with Blu-ray in 2D, which streams at 40 Mbps. “Cable or DBS or all of these things, none of them are trying to compete with Blu-ray on quality,” Holden responded. “You can’t put a 40-megabit stream” over cable, he said.

At the Digital Cinema Summit on Sunday, David Broberg, vice president of consumer video technology at CableLabs, defended cable companies’ “frame-compatible” approach to delivering 3D to the home because it’s capable of “supporting a wide range of resolutions.” Earlier in the day, Peter Wilson, technology chairman at the European Digital Content Forum, was harshly critical of content providers who'll use that approach, though he didn’t single out any one industry by name. The “biggest problem” in broadcasting a good 3D signal to the home has nothing to do with which technology or compression system works best, Wilson told a questioner who had asked if better codecs would bring about better broadcast-quality 3D. The problems, Wilson said, are “related to the accountants,” and “how much bandwidth they will allow” for the cost of transmission. When the decision is made “by people who don’t understand the issues” to beam 3D to the home at half-resolution per eye to save bandwidth, “you're screwed,” Wilson said.

Senior ESPN engineer Ted Szypulski, in another Digital Cinema Summit session, defined “frame-compatible” as “fitting left and right eye images into the existing distribution for monoscopic TV.” The over-under format described by Holden, which also is called “top-down,” is transmitted at half the vertical resolution per eye of full 1080p HD, said Szypulski, who chairs the 3D home master working group at the Society of Motion Picture and TV Engineers. “Side-by-side,” the format that DirecTV has said it will use when launching three dedicated 3D channels in June, transmits at half the horizontal resolution per eye of full HD, Szypulski said. A third format, “frame-sequential,” transmits at half the temporal resolution per eye, he said. Whichever format one chooses, “pick your poison,” Szypulski said.

Broberg thinks cable eventually will shed frame-compatible formatting and move to the Multiview Video Coding codec that Blu-ray 3D uses for transmitting full HD to both eyes, but he admitted he didn’t know how long that would take. Cable’s move to MVC will be “a migratory development,” Broberg said in Q and A. “In other words, as the technology moves forward, the pictures get better, the resolutions get better, the frame sizes get better. So it’s an evolutionary process. I think we see MVC as an evolutionary process as new set-top technology gets deployed and as new decoders get deployed."

Broberg spoke on a panel that conference organizers had said would discuss “the options, plans and strengths for delivery of 3D to the home by terrestrial broadcast, cable, satellite broadband and optical media.” Chris Johns, BSkyB’s chief engineer, described his company’s strategy of beaming live 3D satellite telecasts of top-tier soccer matches to pubs in the U.K. to make the technology known. Tony Jasionowski, Panasonic’s senior group manager of accessibility, described the work of the Panasonic Hollywood Lab in Universal City, Calif., as an authoring center for Blu-ray 3D content. Jim Taylor, senior vice president of Sonic Solutions, described how his company’s Roxio subsidiary is seeding the availability of 3D content online. Each spoke for about 15 minutes. But when it was his turn to describe industry efforts to commercialize 3D over terrestrial broadcasts, ATSC President Mark Richer gave a tongue-in-cheek presentation lasting less than three minutes in which he stressed that the future of free over-the-air 3D broadcasts will be to mobile DTV devices. There was no mention of an ATSC standard for 3D delivery, though efforts along similar lines are underway elsewhere. Audience members told us that they took Richter’s message to be that he and many broadcasters are conceding the business of home 3D TV delivery to pay TV.

Telling the public that 3D glasses are not interoperable so that eyewear bundled with a Sony 3D TV won’t work with an LG set is but one challenge facing the 3D TV rollout, Comcast’s Holden said. Another is when 3D is beamed through a cable or satellite set-top box, there’s a lack of automatic “signaling inside the video to tell the television to switch from a 2D mode to a 3D mode,” he said. “It’s up to the actual end user to press the button on the remote to say switch. And in addition to that, when we talk about side-by-side or over-under, the user needs to select the right format in order to make the television display 3D correctly."

CEA’s 3D working group this summer hopes to finish work on an extension of the existing CEA specifications that will allow HDMI 1.3 set-tops to carry “format signaling” to 1.4-based 3D and make that format set-up automatic, Brad Hunt, president of the consulting firm Digital Media Directions, told the Digital Cinema Summit. The working group has asked HDMI Licensing for help in interpreting HDMI 1.3 and 1.4 protocols before finishing work on the spec extension and is waiting for a response from the consortium, said Hunt, former chief technology officer at MPAA. HDMI Licensing President Steve Venuti sat on stage two chairs away from Hunt and kept silent.

The working group’s fix can’t come a moment too soon, said Ami Dror, chief strategy officer at XpanD Cinema. Hunt had suggested that consumers limit interoperability problems as best they can in the early going by buying a 3D TV and Blu-ray 3D player of the same brand. XpanD’s CTO and his team did just that, buying a Samsung 3D TV and Blu-ray 3D bundle, Dror said. It took two engineers more than two hours to get the TV working properly, he said. Dror, who on XpanD’s behalf has advocated a spec for universal 3D glasses that would work with most sets, thinks such a standard will be ready by June, he said. But that will be just an infrared spec, he said. Still unaddressed will be a standard for universal RF or Bluetooth-based glasses, he said.

NAB Show Notebook …

Motorola’s mobile devices and home systems group on Monday announced software changes in its DCX line of cable set-tops that it said make it unnecessary to reconfigure a box and TV each time video switches between 2D and 3D with a channel change. Processing software in the box will automatically detect 3D content and identifies the 3D format to display it properly on the TV, the company said. The set-top automatically also reformats all text and graphics on screen to match the incoming 3D format for proper display, it said.

"We must give consumers 3D that feels natural and looks wonderful,” Hiroshi Yoshioka, the president of Sony’s Consumer, Professional and Devices Group, said Monday in an opening keynote at the NAB show. Sony thinks 100 million 3D TVs will be sold throughout the world in the next three years, he said. This ambitious forecast is believed to be the first prediction covering multiple years that the company has released on 3D TV set sales. As recently as mid-February, Sony Electronics executives in the U.S. would predict for this year only that 3D set sales would be “very weak” (CED Feb 17 p1).

Discovery Communications hasn’t decided yet whether it will convert to 3D its broad existing library of HD content that was shot in native 2D, John Honeycutt, the network’s newly named executive vice president in charge of international operations, said Sunday in Q and A after his Digital Cinema Summit keynote. “It depends if it works,” Honeycutt said. “We have a lot of content in our library that certainly could be compelling in a conversion.” He’s shopping for tools at this week’s NAB show that would mark “an evolution in 2D-to-3D conversion,” he said. “If we can find a tool that works and delivers quality, sure, we'll go there. But we also realize that we have only one opportunity to impress the consumer, and if we put garbage out there, the consumer’s going to go, ‘Why should I go out there and buy a set?'” Discovery thinks the start of its HD Theater network helped spur millions of HDTV set sales through “the neighbor factor,” Honeycutt said. “So our job in this is to make people go, ‘Wow,’ and get in their car and go buy a 3D set. So we have to deliver good content. If conversion can get us there, sure. But we're not going to skimp on quality.” Top Discovery executives “have been a bit taken aback by the strength of the interest” among consumers in 3D TV sets, Honeycutt said. “Seeing the Masters content, events like that, and certainly what our friends up at ESPN are doing, it’s really going to drive forward. If you remember back to HD, the two things that drove HD were sports and natural history. So sports and natural history are the leaders now in 3D. So it all feels very familiar to us."

Holden is no fan of CE makers who build 2D-to-3D conversion chips into their sets, though he thinks many manufacturers will do so, he said. Using chips to convert native 2D content into 3D is like colorizing old black and white movies, he said. “It does work, but you can tell it was originally black and white,” he said.

There’s “a lot of talk” in the U.S. about “reducing waste” by supplying theaters with 3D glasses that can be recycled or offered for sale to consumers for repeated use, said Michael Karagosian, founder of MKPE Consulting, an adviser to the National Association of Theatre Owners. One of the “biggest challenges” in asking people to buy 3D glasses is telling them that they'll need to buy at least three different mutually incompatible pairs to assure they'll have the right eyewear to work with the various 3D digital cinema systems available, he said. They'll also need to “guess” which pair to carry or to check with the theater before leaving the house to go to the movies, he said.