CES 2009: Sony’s Stringer Gives Peek At 3-D Entertainment
Says New Technology Will Soon Become Standard Feature Across the Industry
By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 1/8/2009 7:29:00 AM
Las Vegas—Sony chairman and CEO Howard Stringer showed off big-screen 3-D video as part of his CES keynote address Thursday, and said the technology is “closer than you think” to becoming a standard feature of the entertainment industry.
The first 3-D clip he showed was a short from Pixar Animation Studio’s Cars, followed by highlights from last week’s Orange Bowl pitting Virginia Tech and Cincinnati. “It’s paving the way toward the national availability of 3-D,” Stringer said. “This is a lot closer than you think.”
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Sony’s demo used RealD’s 3-D imaging system and glasses, and is primarily aimed a movie-theater releases for now rather than home TV viewers.
Stringer brought to the stage DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, who said 3-D is the next major technical move forward after sound and color.
“The movie industry is entering the third great revolution” with three-dimensional movies, Katzenberg said. “This is not my father’s 3-D.” Katzenberg then showed a clip of DreamWorks’ first 3-D movie, Monsters vs. Aliens, featuring a gigantic robot attacking San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.
At the start of his keynote, Stringer said that one of Sony’s guiding strategic philosophies in developing new products is that closed systems are a dead-end. “Consumers expect choice,” he said. “They expect services to work with any device.”
Sony has set a goal that by 2011, 90% of its product categories will connect wirelessly to the Internet and to each other. “Until we transform ourselves into a fully service-based industry, we are in risk of obsolescence,” Stringer said.
Stringer, delivering his third opening-day address at the Las Vegas confab, called out the Internet-connected features of Sony's Bravia HDTV, which have been available previously as a $299 “set-back” add-on. Beginning this spring, he announced, select Bravia models in the U.S. market will now incorporate the Internet technology as a standard feature.
Meanwhile, Sony’s PlayStation Network has 17 million registered accounts with 2.1 million accounts added in December. The service, accessed through Sony’s gaming consoles, has generated 330 million content downloads to date, equal to 33 million single-layer DVDs.
Sony also announced a deal Thursday with Viacom’s MTV Networks to bring some 2,000 hours of programming to the PlayStation video delivery service.
In another example of connected devices, Stringer said Sony has struck a deal with AT&T, which will provide one year of complimentary Wi-Fi access at some 10,000 hot-spot locations nationwide to customers of Sony’s CyberShot camera. That will allow consumers to instantly upload pictures to the Web, via AT&T’s Wi-Fi network.
At another point, John Lasseter, chief creative officer for Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, demonstrated Internet-connected features of the Sony-developed Blu-ray Disc high-definition DVD format.
Lasseter showed the opening menu of Disney’s Blu-ray release of Sleeping Beauty, with a castle in the background that displayed the temperature for Las Vegas on the side of the screen, retrieved from the Internet via BD-Live. Then, he switched the location to Tokyo—and the castle scene turned to night, since it was past midnight in Japan.
Stringer also showed “Flex,” a bendable display technology, and a prototype of glasses that project video onto the lenses but still let the wearer see what’s in front of him. “These are still being perfected in Sony’s labs,” he said.
But 3-D video was Stringer’s showstopper. At CES, Sony is showcasing 3-D video with a screening of a live broadcast of college football’s Bowl Championship Series National Championship Game between the University of Florida and University of Oklahoma for 1,200 people at the Paris Hotel and Casino's Theatre des Arts.
The Vegas hotel will use Sony’s SXRD 4K projection technology combined with RealD's 3-D system. To produce the BCS game, Fox Sports and Burbank, Calif.-based 3ality will use Sony 1500 HD cameras specially modified for stereoscopic production and transmission of the game.
The 3-D broadcast of the BCS title game also is being distributed nationwide to about 80 theaters nationwide, via Cinedigm Digital Cinema's satellite-distribution network.
Before Stringer came out, actor Tom Hanks—star of Sony Pictures Entertainment’s May release of Angels & Demons—did a warm-up comedy bit.
He jokingly expressed regret that he had opted for VHS instead of Sony’s Betamax years ago: “What a different world this would be if I had chosen differently.”
Hanks’ canned intro turned on the observation that Sony’s ubiquitous brand is everywhere he turns, including (supposedly) “when I boot up my computer.” That line gave Hanks pause: “I should have read this before I came out,” he smirked.
In another celebrity photo op, Stringer brought out Yankee hall-of-famer Reggie Jackson, and chatted about the team’s new stadium set to open this spring. Sony, which is furnishing the broadcast control-room equipment, is the new Yankee Stadium’s official CE partner.
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