ESPN 3D Dying Doesn't Mean 3D is Dead

Check out these headlines:

Was 3-D TV a failure? ESPN to end broadcasts
Is 3D TV dead? ESPN 3D to shut down by end of 2013
3DTV Is Officially Never Going To Happen

I keep a newsfeed about 3D film and 3D movies on Google News, and this story has been popping up repeatedly this morning. ESPN 3D has decided they can't continue broadcasting because there's not enough demand for their channel. To be honest, from what I've seen of ESPN 3D in Best Buy 3D TV demos, it doesn't surprise me at all. Their broadcasts consist largely of sports commentary, and one to five grown men talking to you while sitting in an otherwise empty room hardly makes for compelling stereography. Not to mention, many their advertisers really cheaped out on their ads' 3D conversions, resulting in ad time that's a physically painful experience. Some of the sports footage looked kind of neat in 3D, but on active sets you're also halving the frame-rate of broadcasted content, which is going to be very obvious in the fast paced action of sports. The unpredictability of sports also means you're going to be running into uncorrectable problems with the focus/convergence issue. Basically, anybody with any sense in stereographic broadcasting could have told you long before ESPN 3D went live that live sports with 3D ads was going to be a colossal failure.

The problem is that, apart from a promotional channel that Comcast runs to promote their 3D package, ESPN 3D was the only 3D television channel that exists in the United States. Because that effectively killed 3D broadcast stateside, news commentators have jumped to the conclusion that 3D content is unmarketable, and so 3D TV is going to die on the vine in favor of 4K content. Here's why the doomsayers are wrong about 3D TV dying.

I readily admit ESPN was a terrible fit for 3D, but TV is in a situation where they more or less need 3D to work. TV viewership is down generally, especially among younger generations, which projects poorly for the future of broadcast television vs their primary competitor, Internet content (Netflix, YouTube, etc.). One need only look at things like Google Fiber vs Comcast net speeds to see that ISPs can match broadcasters tit for tat in anything that's simply about the amount of information sent (like the resolution increment to 4K). Instead of pushing through a different quantity of data, making 3D content available changes the type of data they're pushing through to something competitors will require time adjusting to. It's like how Apple made a huge dent into the computer market with the iPhone. There was no way into the traditional computing market, so Apple created their own markets in the mobile space and dominated them. 3D is an unclaimed market, while 4K is just an iteration on the same market cable is losing to the Internet.

Some will argue with that by saying that there's no point in creating a market if there's no demand for that market once created. But we don't have enough evidence to say 3D is a low-demand market. For one, 3D TVs haven't fully matured yet. Glasses free lenticular 3D TVs are set to premiere in the near future, which is a technical achievement that will rejuvenate the 3D market if it debuts at a reasonable price. Another point is that 3D content has been proven to have a sizable market interested in the 3D aspect, as evidenced by Avatar, The Avengers, and Life of Pi (all of which did tremendously well in their 3D exhibitions). The problem is not a lack of demand, rather the immaturity of the market.

Perhaps someone will argue that we've spent too long in the infancy of 3D, that the market has been ruined, and will never come back. These people haven't seen Nintendo's market take technology out of infancy to great market appeal. They'll know about the Wii, but they won't connect that it's an iteration on the technology of the Power Glove. The Power Glove was a failure critically and commercially. The Wii wowed the world at its release. Yet both were motion based controls for video games using infrared sensors to detect the controller in space. The Wii just had improved technology. 3D currently suffers from a lot of incompetency in its production, as Clash of the Titans or ESPN 3D's ads could easily prove. What we're seeing is too often like somebody pretending student films represent a permissible standard for film or television in general. It's simply put an immature market full of people learning the ropes of 3D video.

Will 3D TV make a comeback? Only time will tell for certain. But it's certainly foolhardy to declare it dead just because a single channel couldn't forge a new market with a bad entry to it.