Comcast First Cable Affiliate to Sign On For ESPN 3D

With just less than a month to go before the June 11 launch of ESPN 3D, ESPN and Comcast on Wednesday announced that Comcast is the first cable affiliate to sign on to distribute ESPN 3D to its digital cable customers. ESPN is in “active discussion” with other cable affiliates about ESPN 3D distribution deals, spokeswoman Colleen Lynch told us. ESPN announced an ESPN 3D distribution deal with DirecTV in late March (CED March 30 p9).

Since Comcast and ESPN signed the deal only Tuesday, many details about how they'll work together on ESPN 3D remain to be worked out, Derek Harrar, Comcast’s senior vice president and general manager of video and entertainment services, told us in an interview Wednesday. For example, as to how Comcast and ESPN will promote ESPN 3D for the launch, Harrar is “sure we'll have a lot of fun” with consumer messaging, he said. “We'll have some kind of interesting stunt that we'll pull together for the launch, but it’s a little too early for me to talk about that yet."

Comcast ran five anaglyph 3D on-demand “stunts” over a year and a half beginning in 2008 and was “shocked” by the high demand, Harrar said. Across the five events, “16 percent of the time, people chose 3D over just HD” or the standard-definition versions, he said. “The fact that with anaglyph technology, we got 16 percent of the views in 3D when it was still very early and the anaglyph experience is not so great -- that was just a great indicator to us that there’s a segment here. There’s a group of people who are really going to like this technology."

When Comcast carried this year’s ESPN feed in stereoscopic 3D of the Masters golf championship, the results were “spectacular,” Harrar said. The coverage generated “a ton of interest, and again, it was more or less clear that there’s a segment here,” he said. Having live sports in 3D “is going to be really key, and we're excited to do this partnership with ESPN,” he said. Launching ESPN 3D on Comcast “is going to be a lot of fun, and I think it’s going to be very exciting in terms of how it’s going to be embraced by our customers,” Harrar said. “You know it will start with a pretty heavily male-dominated demographic and then expand from there. It’s what we see every time we launch a new technology."

ESPN executives at CES said ESPN 3D, once it launches, won’t be on the air when live 3D events aren’t available (CED Jan 7 p1). With bandwidth “such a hot topic,” ESPN 3D will give the bandwidth back to the cable or satellite operator, so the channel won’t be dark when there’s not an event on, they said then. Still, they said, ESPN 3D “will light up when there’s an event, and it will stay on the grid, the guide."

Again, because Comcast and ESPN signed the deal only Tuesday, “there’s still a lot of technical details to be worked out on exactly how ESPN 3D is going to work,” Harrar said when we asked if the scenario ESPN described at CES will be put into play at Comcast. “For the Masters, that’s basically, exactly what we've done,” he said. “We left that channel on our lineup so we have a clear channel to put other events or whatever programming might come up from time to time. We sort of do that all the time. We kind of joke internally about scheduling bandwidth rather than allocating bandwidth. We've gotten better at that over the years. We're entering an interesting period in Comcast’s history. We're really approaching things much more creatively and in such a way that we have infinite space. So we're going to find a way. We have a great roadmap with all kinds of true technologies about how to manage bandwidth. We're very comfortable with everything we have in our plans that we can get that done and really lead.”