3D Broadcasting Seen Hampered by Content, Cost, Technical Issues
Lack of 3D content and a working business model remain major roadblocks to the arrival of 3D broadcasts, said Chris Chinnock, president of Insight Media, last week during the company’s webcast, “Overview of 3D Broadcast Formats, Trends & Impacts.” Content in 3D remains “very limited and of differing quality,” Chinnock said, but “the good news is there’s a lot of activity on a worldwide basis to create more 3D content.” It takes time to develop enough inventory to support a 3D channel, he said, adding there’s “quite a bit of activity in this area so I'm optimistic we'll see more content going forward."
Insight Media predicts more converted content of “intermediate quality” will appear to “feed the pipeline.” So far, the leadership on content has been “quite high,” he said, noting that large companies have taken the initiative with 3D in a way they didn’t with the HD transition. “The bigger leadership has come earlier than it did in HD which I see as a positive sign,” he said.
The biggest challenge with content is the business model, Chinnock said. “If you cannot charge more for a 3D telecast or 3D ad, how do you recoup that investment in 3D?” he asked. Production costs can be higher for 2D, too, so “solving this riddle is clearly a challenge” and something the industry is wrestling with today, he said.
On the technical side, 3D signaling methods for auto-detection by displays is an issue that needs to be addressed in the near term, Chinnock said. When consumers put a Blu-ray disc into a player, auto-detection technology automatically puts the player into 3D mode, and the TV reads the content as 3D material, he said. That works well, he said. In the broadcast environment, a set-top box doesn’t have 3D auto-detection so it can’t communicate the presence of a 3D signal to the TV and specify how to handle that signal. Standards are in the works but they haven’t been ratified, he said.
A set-top box also needs to be able to render 3D closed captions and graphic overlays and progress is being made on that front, Chinnock said. Technicolor showed a “disparity box” at CES with depth characteristics that ensure captions remain in front of main characters to preserve the 3D effect. The goal is to make that process dynamic so that broadcasters could send out the disparity map and other metadata, which the set-top box and TV could process for display in real-time, he told us. Regarding a timetable for implementation, Chinnock said he expects that solution to be part of a European 3D broadcast standard due out this summer with implementation expected by early next year. The U.S. is likely to trail Europe by 6 months or a year, he said.
Broadcasters are also concerned about local ad insertion, Chinnock said. “If you're in the middle of a 3D stream and you insert this 2D ad, what happens on the TV?” he asked. Questions remain whether the 2D ad will display in 2D, whether a quick 2D-3D conversion can be done or whether it will be handled in another way, he said. Similar issues apply to channel switching, he said. When going from a 2D channel to a 3D channel, switching time may be “very long,” so finding ways to minimize that the lag time “is something they need to figure out,” he said.
Technology for 3D is currently in phase 1 of a four-phase distribution roadmap for 3D set-top boxes, with the first phase being today’s frame-compatible, service-compatible trials using existing compression methods and built on HDMI 1.3a, Chinnock said. Phase 2, built around HDMI 1.4a, will be the rollout of service-compatible solutions standards and solutions in 2013 where there’s “consumer pull” and market growth. Phase 3, expected in 2014, could see the development of disparity maps, 2D-3D conversion, multi-view conversion and virtual cameras requiring more advanced codecs. Phase 4 -- sometime after 2015 -- will see the rollout of 1080p 3D, 4K and multi-view broadcasts, using even more advanced codecs, he said.