MPEG Industry Forum Launches 3DTV Working Group

Panel's Goal to Develop Standards, Business Models

by George Winslow -- Multichannel News, 1/11/2010 12:21:55 PM

In another sign that major vendors see 3D technologies as a promising new business, the recently formed MPEG Industry Forum 3DTV Working Group is embarking on an ambitious effort to speed the development of standards and business models for the transmission of 3D content to the home.


Founding members of the group include Motorola, Harmonic, Dicas, NetLogic, MainConcept and TDVision, but the group's first meeting at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Jan. 7 to 10 attracted a wide array of companies, including cable programmers and telcos.

MPEGIF vice president David Price, Harmonic's vice president of business development and marketing communications, said the group expects to soon have 30 to 40 groups and companies from around the world involved in the effort.

A key part of its efforts will be education.

"We are right at the beginning now," said McCarthy. "There are many competing ways to do 3D and there is a lot of confusion right now. We want to provide some clarity on the technical side to the decision-makers and some clarity on the business side to the technologists and standards committees."

The group will provide backing for standards-based 3D technologies, rather than proprietary ones. "Motorola and Harmonic are both in the business of creating technology that supports standards-based infrastructures," Price noted. "Right now we are getting a rush of different proprietary or quasi-proprietary types of solutions coming into the market.

"We would hate to see BSkyB go off and do their thing in a different way from say the guys at Discovery and the guys at ESPN," said Price. "That would fragment the market. We want a homogeneous market, the kind of market that is created by the adoption of standards."

The group won't develop those standards itself. Rather, it will work closely with the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), along with other associations and standards-setting bodies.

"MPEG is in the business of creating motion picture moving images standards, but they don't play a role in the education, promulgation and adoption of standards," Price said. "Where they finish, we pick up."

Standards can be developed quickly, said Price.

"If the consolidation of standards happens at the same pace as the rush of interest in 3D, I think we are no further than 12 months from the finalization and adoption of a real standard," he said.

A lack of standards has been a key impediment blocking the rapid rollout of 3D, according to analysts, though some important steps have already been taken. The new HDMI 1.4 standard released last year supports 3D and SMPTE is working on a 3D standard for masters that should be completed this summer.

In December, the Blu-ray Disk Association released a specification for 3D that will allow consumers to watch in-format movies on 3D-capable Blu-ray players and TVs.

Even so, the technology will take years to develop. A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers study predicted that by 2014, 3D capable TVs will be in about 15% to 25% of all U.S. homes and about 20% to 30% of all U.S. cinemas will be able to handle 3D films.

That report also noted that some types of content, such as regular TV fare that is interrupted with a heavy commercial ad load, might not work well with an immersive 3D experience that requires viewers to use glasses.

Still, both McCarthy and Price stressed that 3D is likely to move faster than high definition television, which was first tested in 1969 in Japan and is only now reaching 50% penetration rates in the U.S. Unlike the early days of HD, major movie studios are already producing popular blockbuster films in 3D and multichannel operators face fewer bandwidth constraints, McCarthy noted.

"I don't think 3D is going to be as disruptive as HD in terms of the infrastructure," he said.

A pair of satellite providers -- the United Kingdom's BSkyB and DirecTV in the U.S.-- plan to use their existing structure and set-tops to deliver 3D images that can be viewed on the newer sets now coming to market.

Last week, CableLabs also announced that its tests show that "many of the digital set-top boxes deployed by cable operators are capable of processing 3D TV signals in frame-compatible formats."

Those formats carry separate left and right video signals within the video frame used to convey a conventional HD signal.

Further down the road, as more bandwidth becomes available, other systems may be able to deliver a HD image for both eyes in high definition 1080p format.

"We can see a way to deliver 3D now, a way to deliver it in 12 months, and a way to do it in 24 months with even better quality," McCarthy said.