ESPN 3D to Debut at 720p, Will ‘Gravitate’ to 1080p Over Time

ESPN 3D’s plan “going forward is to do separate telecasts” from ESPN HD and ESPN2 HD, “using side-by-side trucks, talent, producers, directors, so on and so forth,” said Bryan Burns, vice president of strategic business planning. The emerging technology group that Pagano heads at ESPN “is taking a look at trying to render 2D from 3D,” Burns said. “We don’t have all the answers yet” on rendering 2D from 3D, Pagano said. “We have gut feelings on what may work. The goal, as a function of time, is to learn what we need to do to make sure to at least minimize the mutually exclusive effect” of ESPN’s existing networks and ESPN 3D, and “converge the production process as much as possible,” Pagano said. Burns said ESPN2 HD plans a live 3D test Feb. 25 of a Harlem Globetrotters event in Orlando, where it will “try to pull a 2D out of it. We're literally trying this within six weeks.”

ESPN 3D won’t be on the air when live events aren’t available, Burns said. “With bandwidth such a hot topic, we decided this time, that when an event finishes, we'll give that bandwidth back to Cablevision,” for example, he said. “So if it goes the way we think it’s going to go, an Armstrong Cable in Pittsburgh will have ESPN 3D at channel 242, whatever it is. It will light up when there’s an event, it will stay on the grid, the guide, but it will not be dark when there’s not an event on.” The network has begun fielding calls from cable operators, “saying, ‘Come talk to us about how we can work together to do things so that consumers understand what we're doing,'” Burns said. Consumer messaging, such as trumpeting to viewers the next live events coming up on ESPN 3D, will be “one of those things that will have to evolve,” Burns said.

The test ESPN did in September of beaming the USC-Ohio State football game live in 3D (CED Oct 22 p1) “was probably the culmination of two years of hypothetically screwing around vigorously” to bring live 3D sports to commercial reality, Pagano said. “That game everything came together because we had the camera and the lens sets working fine, with a production switcher in a truck, and that was a culminating test.” As a result, “all that screwing around vigorously turned into a cement pond. We were able to get it on fiber, we were able conceptually to get it on to a satellite for a test of distribution.” Production workflows are still an unfinished “science project, because this is a different sort of experience” from HD, “both in looking at but also in producing, he said. “This is basically parallel video going around the planet. It’s like stereo video for the eyes.”

The “next 72 hours” at CES “are going to tell us a lot” about how fast home 3D will catch on with consumers, said Burns. Previously, Burns thought the 3D rollout to the home would happen much more slowly than HD, but now he’s not so sure, he said. ESPN “wants to see what percentage of inventory” of the sets being introduced at CES “will come to market” this year with 3D capability, he said. “Will it be 10 percent, or will it be 50 or 60 percent? That question is going to answer a lot for us.”

That ESPN 3D was the fifth most searched Google item on Tuesday when the network’s start was announced gave Burns and others reason to think that 3D acceptance in the home will come much more quickly than they previously thought, he said. Tuesday “was a remarkable day, a day like we never had with HD.” Burns now thinks home 3D “may have bigger legs than I thought it was going to have,” he said. “But how many screens are going to be out there, and what are they going to cost? We still don’t know what the cost differential is yet.”

ESPN will then need to find out “how our distributors are going to embrace this,” Burns said. “Will they want a 3D tier, a package, a premium service?” Their decisions also will figure prominently in how fast home 3D penetrates U.S. homes, he said. If they think 3D should be a “lower, more fundamental, basic-type tier service, that’s one thing,” Burns said. “If they choose to sell it via Starz, HBO or Cinemax, that’s another thing.”

There are now no plans to runs ads on ESPN 3D, but “not because we don’t want to,” Burns said. Pagano said “we could only prioritize so many things, and commercial activity was the last priority. … I'm just trying to get the infrastructure set up to present the event first.” Pagano thinks a “bigger question” will be whether advertisers embrace 3D, he said. “They were slow to embrace HD by getting real product into the pipeline. This would be an added cost for them” that likely won’t produce the desired “yield” at the start, he said.

ESPN 3D will “acquire” a 3D “world feed” from World Cup sponsor FIFA, just as ESPN HD uses FIFA’s HD world feed, Burns said. FIFA, not ESPN 3D or ESPN HD, controls those feeds, he said. “I'm sure as this evolves, our people will interact with FIFA” on promoting use of the tighter camera angles that ESPN has found make for a better 3D viewing experience, he said. “It will be their production to produce, but we'll express our thoughts to them and see where it goes.” The Summer X Games late July on ESPN 3D will be the first live event “that we own,” Burns said. ESPN 3D also plans its own production of a live telecast of a major college football game sometime around Labor Day weekend, he said.