Rebecca Day

Major League Baseball players, many experiencing live sports for the first time in 3D, seemed to enjoy playing up the 3D effect during cutaways from the action at Tuesday night’s All-Star game on Fox Sports via DirecTV. Donning polarized 3D glasses for use with on-location 3D TV monitors provided by Fox, players showed excitement watching the game in a new way and participating in casual interviews to highlight the technology.

Amid CEDIA’s most challenging times since its inception some 20 years ago, the organization has added a future technology pavilion to the list of exhibits at the CEDIA Expo in Atlanta Sept. 22-26. The pavilion will showcase emerging trends that could offer business opportunities for custom electronics specialists in unfamiliar areas including sustainability and digital home health care.

A palpable sense of relief went through executives from the YES Network Sunday at the Helen Mills Theater in Manhattan when a glitch that nearly soiled viewers’ first impression of baseball in 3D was resolved in the third inning of the YES/DirecTV telecast of the New York Yankees-Seattle Mariners game. After two innings of unimpressive low-resolution video, double-images in graphics and motion glitches, the picture popped into impressive 3D focus. That prompted a YES spokesman to address the crowd -- including reporters and guests of YES and sponsors Panasonic and DirecTV -- and announce that a previously undisclosed problem with a fiber cable in the 3D truck had been fixed.

Best Buy Mobile launched its Movie Mode interactive cell phone application last week with the opening of Universal Pictures’ Despicable Me. At a special pre-release screening at the Times Square AMC Theaters in Manhattan, reporters were given demo iPhones to audition the feature, which syncs to select smartphones and delivers special content linked to specific cues in the movie. According to a spokesman at the event, the feature will extend to other media, including DVDs, in the future, although follow-up questions regarding future plans for disc-based Movie Mode versions weren’t addressed.

Thiel Audio’s addition last week of Amazon to its roster of authorized retailers has left dealers in the speaker maker’s struggling brick-and-mortar AV specialty base gloomy and anxious about the impact of additional online competition, say merchants canvassed by Consumer Electronics Daily. “I was warned it might happen about three to four months ago,” said Tom Wells, president of Integrated Media Systems in Sterling, Va., typifying other specialty retailers. “But I still don’t understand it."

The International 3D Society (I3DS) said it’s sponsoring a six-hour course July 17 at the University of Southern California’s Entertainment Technology Center to help bring film industry professionals up to speed on 3D. Society CEO Jim Chabin said the course is open to anyone interested in stereoscopic 3D. The program is the first of 18 learning modules about 3D to be held year round, he told us. The first class includes an overview covering the art, technology, business, and public policy and health aspects of stereoscopic 3D, followed by practice sessions in film and live events. The course ends with a session on planning and budgeting a 3D production. Buzz Hays, the chief instructor at Sony’s 3D Technology Center, is the chairman of I3DS, which was designed “with a lot of input from Sony,” Chabin said. The I3DS will give the first Harold Lloyd Award to a member of the stereoscopic 3D technical community at an Oct. 5 ceremony at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The award acknowledges technological achievement “in the new era of 3D,” Chabin said. Efforts on 3D from 1980 to 2009 are eligible. The final judging is at the end of July, and the winner will be announced Sept. 1. The award is named for Harold Lloyd, an actor, director and producer who was an advocate of 3D and the first president of the Hollywood Stereoscopic Society, in 1950.

YES Network has added seven distributors to the list of those showing the first Major League Baseball games to be televised in 3D, between the New York Yankees and the Seattle Mariners this weekend. Joining in the telecast with DirecTV, a co-sponsor of the event along with Panasonic, are Blue Ridge Communications, Cablevision, Comcast, Cox, Service Electric, Time Warner Cable and Verizon FiOS. The game is being played in Seattle, but the feed is being offered only to current YES Network affiliates in the Yankee’s home-team TV viewing territory.

CULVER CITY, Calif. -- Nearly four months into operation, the Sony 3D Tech Center is still drawing a packed house, said Buzz Hays, executive Stereoscopic 3D producer at Sony Corp. and chief instructor at the 3D Technology Center. With a waiting list that at one time numbered 500, more than 300 cinematographers have passed through the free, three-day program, an integral part of Sony’s plan to raise the bar of 3D technology throughout the industry, Hays told journalists last week on a tour of Sony Pictures. “All of this training was designed to get people up to speed quickly on 3D and to have people avoid the pitfalls that we've gone through in making 3D films,” Hays said. The Tech Center is also expanding class offerings to directors and film editors and will hold classes in London for cinematographers in the coming months.

BEVERLY HILLS -— At a time when other mid-level audio companies are broadening distribution to boost revenues, Sony is tightening distribution on its high-end ES-series line by limiting product to specialty AV and custom installation dealers who can demonstrate the benefits of the advanced-feature products and provide the education and installation expertise to get the most out of those features, it said. At the launch of Sony’s 2010 ES line last week, Brian Siegel, vice president of the company’s home audio and video group, told reporters that the company has a responsibility to specialty dealers, enthusiasts and shareholders to use the ES line to create new opportunities in a challenging environment.

Sezmi, the hybrid over-the-air/broadband personal TV service that hopes to take a chunk from cable and satellite’s customer bases, is readying another round of markets for launch by year end. After its pilot debut in the Los Angeles metro area last November, Sezmi rolled out to 10 additional markets earlier this month, including Boston, Detroit, Fort Lauderdale, Houston, Kansas City, Miami, Orlando, Phoenix, Portland, Ore., and San Francisco. The service is selling through Best Buy stores in those markets and Sezmi also hopes to add more top-tier retailers and regional telcos to its distribution base, Travis Parsons, director of business development, told Consumer Electronics Daily.