‘Irrational Exuberance’

Media’s to Blame For Feeding Active Vs. Passive 3D TV ‘Format War,’ Samsung Says

April 12, 2011 by Paul Gluckman|Top News

LAS VEGAS -- It’s the news media that’s to blame for escalating the debate between active-shutter and passive 3D TV technologies into a “format war,” a Samsung U.S. executive said Saturday during a panel at the Digital Cinema Summit on the eve of the NAB Show. “The media has played this out as a format war,” said Dan Schinasi, senior manager of HDTV product planning at Samsung. For consumers, the debate is nothing more than “a technology choice” between active and passive 3D TV, he said. He didn’t mention senior LG and Samsung executives from Korea having used unusually harsh words to denigrate each other’s 3D TV technologies.

Earlier, Schinasi defended active-shutter as “the only technology for consumers that will produce full HD.” He stopped well short of criticizing LG or passive 3D TV, as Samsung executives have at recent opportunities. In fact, Schinasi said, Samsung wants “to see the whole industry get a lift” from 3D TV, and “so we're very happy to see passive” make a positive impact on expanding the market.

Schinasi’s conciliatory remarks were in sharp contrast to fiery statements that top Samsung Korea executives made at CES. Those remarks came soon after LG said it would stop making active-shutter LCDs within six months to concentrate on its patented film-pattern retarder (FPR) passive LCD TV 3D technology (CED Jan 6 p4). One of the executives, Bong-Ku Kang, senior vice president of Samsung’s product marketing group, said at a CES display roundtable that FPR technology was “not sustainable long-term.” That’s because, in addition to its half-HD resolution per eye, its “many obstacles” include limited viewing angles and crosstalk, resulting in interference between the left- and right-eye images, he said (CED Jan 10 p1).

On CES Press Day, LG shuttled reporters and analysts to an off-site hotel for detailed comparative demonstrations of active versus passive 3D and Q-and-A with CEO Young Soo Kwon. In posted placards and demonstrators’ comments, LG spared no opportunity to bash active-shutter 3D TV as prone to light loss and plagued by heavy, expensive, power-hungry glasses that are easily susceptible to interference.

In recent weeks, engineers at Samsung’s European subsidiary stepped up the campaign to disparage passive 3D TV in general and FPR technology in particular. One engineer beckoned our U.K. correspondent to attend private A/B demonstrations of Samsung’s active-shutter sets versus LG’s interlaced passive LCD TVs to refute LG’s focus group research findings that average consumers won’t notice the resolution differences between active and passive. Samsung’s ground rules barred us from quoting the company by name or even disclosing that it was Samsung that had staged the comparative demonstrations. On those conditions, we declined Samsung’s invitation.

Naysayers were wrong to condemn 3D TV as a 2010 failure, executives on Saturday’s panel said. All began their remarks with statements reaffirming that their companies remain committed to selling 3D TVs. The CE industry often is guilty of “irrational exuberance” when new technologies are introduced, and 3D TV was no different, said Jeff Cove, Panasonic vice president for technology and corporate development. Except for “managing expectations,” the industry did “a good job for an introductory year” in selling 3D TV, he said. On key metrics such as the number of retail distribution points and price premiums, 3D TV’s first year was much more successful than HDTV’s, he said. Schinasi, noting that the industry, according to CEA estimates, sold about 1.2 million 3D TV sets in 2010, agreed that HDTV took two years to reach a million units. And Tim Alessi, LG’s director of new product development for home electronics, said 3D TV had successfully weathered “a lot of skepticism” in its introductory year. “Now that consumers have been exposed to it for a year, they see it’s for real,” he said.

Asked how critical a role the lack of Blu-ray 3D titles played in impeding 3D TV’s progress last year, Mike Abary, senior vice president of Sony’s Home Division, said “absolutely” that Blu-ray 3D movies will be “a driver” once more titles become available. “Studios are looking for a return on investment” to recoup the high costs of Blu-ray 3D mastering, Abary said, emphasizing he was not speaking on behalf of Sony Pictures. That ROI can’t be guaranteed unless a title is bundled with the purchase of a 3D TV and the costs subsidized by the TV maker, he said. “As more and more scale becomes available, we'll start to see more titles."

Blu-ray 3D title availability is “critically important” to the success of 3D TV, Alessi said. “The bundling issue is an interesting one. Everybody last year was out to strike a deal. But the mistake was the exclusive bundle.” That reduced the “buying decision for a $2,000 piece of hardware” so it became “based on a movie title,” he said. “I'm not sure how many people bought a Sony TV to get a crack at Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.” It became “a weird situation,” he said.

Moderator Brad Hunt, consultant and former chief technology officer at MPAA, introduced the panelists by saying he would try to poke Abary into saying when Sony might introduce the 24-inch glasses-free OLED TV it showed as a prototype at CES. Abary was the only panelist who didn’t want to be pinned down in speculating how many years away large-screen glasses-free autostereoscopic TVs would be commercialized. One of autostereoscopic’s “biggest inhibitors” is cost, Abary said. “The cost is tremendous for autostereoscopic. Unless and until that cost comes down significantly, autostereoscopic will only scratch the surface."

Alessi speculated that glasses-free, large-screen 3D TV displays would take “at least five to seven years before they'll be ready for prime time,” assuming their cost and performance can be brought into line. His understanding is that there also are “different things that have to be done on the content side” to accommodate autostereoscopic large-screen 3D TVs, he said. So there are “still a few barriers to be addressed,” he said. Schinasi said Samsung’s top managers have said it could take 10 years before autostereoscopic large-screen TVs are viable. “It’s not that the technology can’t exist, it just would be cost-prohibitive,” he said.

NAB Show Notebook

Hugo Cabret is now in post-production and on track for its Nov. 23 U.S. release, said visual effects director Rob Legato. He’s working with director Martin Scorsese on the film. Paramount, which will distribute the film, barred Legato from showing a clip at NAB, he said. Scorsese and Legato recently screened a 2D version of the movie, “and it was missing something,” Legato said in a Digital Cinema Summit keynote. “I never thought that I would be able to say that of a dramatic film, that 3D actually helped and created a different sense of the movie than I got from the 2D version. I love 2D, I've grown up with it … but this is another thing.” The film is Martin Scorsese’s first shot in 3D.

The Advanced TV Systems Committee has taken “a slow, conservative approach” to 3D TV, President Mark Richer said at NAB. “We haven’t jumped on the bandwagon like others have, for good or for bad,” he said. In the last year, “we have done a lot of work” on 3D TV, he said, though “we have more questions than we do answers,” as an ATSC planning team said in its recent report (CED March 24 p1) . Richer’s “humble opinion” on 3D TV is that terrestrial broadcasters need “to focus on devices that move,” he said. For broadcasters to deliver 3D TV programming to “fixed” receivers in the home is “probably not the place to focus,” he said. Of beaming 3D TV signals to portable handheld DTV devices, Richer said he’s “not sure there’s a big rush to do that,” but for terrestrial broadcasters, that “makes the most sense.”

Sky has seen “very, very rapid acceleration” in consumer acceptance of 3D TV in the U.K. in the year since launching its Sky 3D dedicated channel last April, said Chris Johns, chief engineer. Sky estimates there are now 140,000 3D TV screens in U.K. homes, well ahead of its forecast a year ago that there would be 100,000, he said. Of the 140,000, Sky 3D has 70,000 activations, he said. Sky 3D is on the air 15 hours a day and is available for free to “top-tier” subscribers on all 3.5 million Sky set-top boxes, he said. Sky 3D has shown more than 150 hours of sports programming since its commercial launch, including 100 live sports events, he said. The channel shows 2-3 live soccer or rugby matches a week, Johns said. Sky’s mantra is that it’s easy to do 3D, but very hard to do good 3D, he said. “If we start delivering cut-price 3D, people won’t buy into it,” he said. “It’s all about quality, not quantity. Give your customers a reason to wear their 3D glasses. 3D will not improve bad programming.” Sky’s mission is to avoid 2D-to-3D conversion at all costs and to avoid giving subscribers “theme park 3D,” but rather an “immersive” 3D viewing experience they can comfortably watch for hours, he said. “Create with care,” Johns said of 3D content conception. “A comfortable experience is a must.”

The Society of Motion Picture and TV Engineers in June will publish a 400-page compilation of “the most relevant and the most revolutionary” technical papers on 3D cinema and TV technology released in the group’s 95-year history, SMPTE President Peter Lude said. “You might be surprised to learn that back in 1921 they were talking about the pros and cons of frame-sequential versus passive-polarized versus anaglyph 3D,” he said. “So they weren’t in the dark ages” when it came to 3D technology, he said. SMPTE’s booth at the NAB Show is taking preorders on the book, which is titled, “3D Consumer and Television Technology: The First 100 Years.”

Digital Stream, licensee from Technicolor of the RCA brand name for small-screen TVs, is using the NAB Show to introduce a line of four “pocket TV hybrid” portables containing mobile DTV and standard DTV tuners. They'll be sold online on a new e-commerce website, www.RCAPortableTV.com, that went live Monday. The line begins with a 3.5-inch model that lists for $119 and includes an LED-backlit screen, signal strength indicator, closed captioning and an easel-back stand. It runs on AC power or will work for four hours on four rechargeable AA batteries. A step-up widescreen model for $159 adds a brighter display, FM reception and four hours of power on a built-in lithium polymer battery. There’s also a 7-inch widescreen model, $179, with a high-resolution display and built-in lithium polymer battery. Rounding out the line is a $129 automobile tuner/receiver for car infotainment systems that’s smaller than a deck of cards and is powered through a car charger. The pocket TVs are “among the first handheld hybrid television receivers in the U.S. market, and the new mobile DTV functionality makes it possible for viewers to enjoy their favorite programs as well as local news, weather, and sports wherever they go,” said Chris Lee, Digital Stream’s vice president of sales and marketing. He said the company is “closely monitoring the rollout of mobile DTV market by market, and we are working with retailers that are interested in bringing these new options to viewers.”