At a recent event, ESPN’s Adrian Pennington spoke about their foray into 3D sports events and while they’ve committed to a full year and are planning a 2nd, they’re currently having difficulties justifying the effort required.
“Regardless of whether we continue as an event-based network or go to a 24/7 network switch to VoD, we definately have to make production efficiencies to make it work. We’ve also got to get more eyeballs looking at 3D to get some idea of acceptance in the marketplace.”
Currently they’re not found a good Return on their Investment, and the technology required is still rather specialized, expensive, and difficult to integrate into their real-time tools. However, they are also doing a lot of research into stereoscopic 3D technologies and end-user effects.
ESPN is also to conduct a major study into depth metadata and depth analysis.
“This is major topic which impacts events downstream. For example we need to think very carefully about how we place closed captions and graphics in stereo. Do we need to develop some automated alarm which will alert us before we go to air whether a graphic is going to occlude the image? These are monumental challenges which are vital to enable us to produce good 3D.”
via Question marks over ESPN’s 3D future – main-content | TVBEurope Magazine Online & In Print.
